If he had been tagged with a tracker like the one he had used to keep tabs on the Yukon, they wouldn’t have needed to stay in visual range.
Powell sat into the driving seat and pulled out his satellite phone, then thought better of it. There was no telling exactly what kind of transmitter Cole had tagged the car with. As well as offering up his position on a digital plate, for all Powell knew, Cole could trace any incoming or outgoing calls or, at the very least, listen to what was said.
Maybe Powell was being a little paranoid. But paranoia was exactly what had kept him alive throughout his career. He wasn’t about to give it up now.
***
“Gas,” Kane said with a chuckle. “He’s just getting gas.”
Sophia answered him with a look of quiet contemplation. They had stayed a half-mile back out of sight tracking Powell’s progress and position on the scanner. His being stationary in the one position on the outskirts of the city for so long had her suspecting he had reached his destination. She had Kane move up to check.
The way Powell dawdled around at the back of the Prius, where Erikson’s shot had hit the car, had her thinking he had discovered their tactic. But the lax way in which he climbed into the driving seat and took an age to start the engine had her thinking otherwise – until the Prius took off out of the gas station like a rocket and tore up the street toward downtown.
“He’s on to us,” Kane said, shifting the Yukon into drive. They were on the other side of the street concealed behind a manicured hedge, facing the opposite direction in which Powell had gone. There was no time to observe driver etiquette or the rules of the road.
Kane wrenched the steering wheel to the left and reversed right through the hedge, executing a high-speed K turn.
“He can’t hide,” said Cole.
“But he can run,” said Kane. “Only the car is tagged. He isn’t. If he gets out of eye contact, he can ditch the wheels and go on foot.” He jerked his head in Sophia’s direction. “That happens, she’ll probably fry one of us to make a point.”
Sophia gave a slight nod. “That’s right,” she said, like she was being reminded. “I could do that.” She looked at her tablet. “He’s made a right, three hundred meters ahead.”
Ben grabbed a hold of the loop fixed over the door with one hand and gripped the back of his seat with the other. He dug his bare feet into the carpet and pressed his knees into the front passenger seat.
“Good thinking,” said Sophia, watching Ben, fixing herself into her safety belt. Ben followed suit and returned Erikson’s curious gaze. “You not going to?” he said to the taciturn crack shot.
Erikson looked away.
“Against operational procedure,” Sophia muttered.
Kane steered deftly through the traffic. When they got to the right turn, he took the Yukon around it along a perfect arc, like it was tethered to a post on the corner.
“Where is he?” Kane barked.
“Left in two hundred,” said Sophia.
Cars were scattered all over the road like discarded toys in front of them. Powell had driven through a fire hydrant. The resulting cascade of water on to the street had bought him some time.
Kane didn’t think twice. He wrenched the Yukon to the right and mounted the sidewalk. The guttural roar as the Yukon’s mighty V8 vented was all the warning pedestrians on the footpath ahead got.
“Come on, people,” Kane muttered. “Move.”
Ben waited for a body to hit the windscreen. He was grateful when none did. The Yukon reached the end of the sidewalk and Kane hauled it blindly out into the street, sideswiping two oncoming cars who had slowed to see what was going on, the occupants’ eyes and mouths opening wide in a mix of surprise, panic and fear.
“I see you,” Kane growled in satisfaction.
Ben caught a glimpse of the Prius powering over a speed bump and slamming back to the ground, the impact causing something underneath to work itself loose and drag along the road, slowing the car considerably. Enough for Kane to catch up and pull right alongside.
“No point hanging back. We should take him, lady. We’ll find out whatever it is you want. Erikson’s a dab hand when it comes to extracting information.”
The Prius swung to the left, driving its nose into the Yukon’s huge front wheel arch. It caught Kane off guard and he veered off into the oncoming lane, a cacophony of horns ringing out as collisions were narrowly avoided.
There was a succession of deafening cracks. Ben had been so fixated on Jason’s car that he hadn’t seen Erikson pull a gun from under his jacket. It was right next to his face. The shots took out the tinted rear window of the Yukon and the Prius’s driver’s window.
Ben saw Jason for the first time, his hair a little grayer than when he had previously known him, as he cowered and did his best to shield himself from the barrage of fire.
He shot a glance back at where the shots had come from with a double-take and Ben traced his eye line to Sophia. Jason stared at her for a moment too long, then to where Ben sat, before slamming on the brakes.
Kane spat a succession of curses and looked in the rear-view as he stopped, everyone in the big SUV lurching forward with the momentum. Ben grabbed the headrest of Cole’s seat and whirled around to see the Prius reversing back down the street at speed. It made a sharp turn and bounced up over the curb, at an angle, into a multi-level parking garage.
With the only traffic behind having already stopped to give the two vehicles a wide berth, Kane had the Yukon at the garage entrance in a matter of seconds. The front fender scraped the ground as they started up the ramp and wound their way around a spiral up two levels.
“Where is he?” Kane said.
“He’s stopped,” said Sophia.
They rounded the final bend and found themselves in a parking lot bereft of parked cars. The only vehicle present was the Prius, a hundred meters directly ahead, and idling at the top of a ramp back down. Jason sat with his arm out the driver’s window, dangling the tag Erikson had pinned to the back of the car. He dropped it to the ground and beeped the horn, rolling down the ramp and disappearing out of view.
“It’s a trap,” said Erikson.
“Asshole didn’t take us in here for fun,” said Kane. At once they were reversing down the spiral at speed, the side of the Yukon hitting and scraping along the walls on the way down.
As they reached street level, Kane’s eyes widened. A large, steel mesh shutter was blocking their path.
“Thing closed soon as we got in. Someone’s looking out for our friend.”
Kane slammed the Yukon into drive and started back up the ramp. He turned it around at the top and accelerated back down the spiral at speed. “Yeah, I’d be bracing myself right about now if I was you,” he said to everyone.
Ben slid down and looped his arms through the safety belt again. Sophia did the same. Erikson clung hard to the handle above his head while Cole basically squirmed in his seat. He looked like he was going to vomit.
The gate came around fast. Ben had his doubts whether the Yukon would break through, but it did, with ease, the SUV punching straight through, and slamming straight into a parked car out on the street.
Their vehicle was listing badly to one side. The hood had sprung up and smashed into the windscreen causing it to shatter in a spider’s web of elaborate cracks. The impact with the gate had caused all of the airbags in the cabin to deploy, which had been of no help to Cole. A shard from the gate had pierced his window and then him, pinning him to his own seat through his chest.
He was alive. But not for very much longer by the looks of things.
“Pull the car over, Kane,” said Sophia.
“No way,” he answered, speeding up instead. “We lost our man. So I figure as long I’m the one in the driving seat, I won’t be the one you decide to fry.”
“I do like the way your mind works,” she said. “But your skillset, and that of your partner, is too valuable to me to ‘fry’ you.”
She l
eaned forward and tested the shard of steel skewering Cole. He grimaced with pain and winced as she eyed the wound.
She scrunched up her face. “I think that’s cut something important, Lucas, I’m afraid.”
Cole’s eyes opened wide. “Sophia? Please. Help me. You can’t let me die. You need me.”
“Look, Lucas,” she said. “Let’s not lie to each other. There’s never been any love lost between you and me. After you sabotaged the program, you effectively ended my career. Killed everything I ever worked for. Everything I ever cared about.” She dipped her finger in his wound and held up an index fingertip covered in blood. “You’re bleeding all over the place, literally leaving a trail of evidence. My nanotech – the modified version – is in your blood. I can’t afford to leave anything behind.”
Sophia caught Kane exchanging a look with Erikson.
“We wouldn’t make it to a hospital in time,” she said, “even it was an option.”
They didn’t say anything in reply. She shook her head and exhaled.
“If you knew what I knew about Cole, how cheap he saw the lives of men exactly like you, decorated soldiers who had served their country, you wouldn’t even be questioning this.”
29
“The program I mentioned,” said Sophia, “that Cole and I were involved with, was a top-secret project seeking to develop, you won’t be surprised, the first invisible soldier. At the time, of course, that would have seemed an insane proposition. But the crazy thing was, at the base where this project - they called it ‘Project Clear’ - was taking place, they had in their possession already, an honest-to-God invisible human being. One who had apparently “occurred” in nature.
“As scientists go, Cole was ambitious. Ferociously so. And impatient. To the point of frustration. The team assembled for the project was big. That didn’t suit him at all. Nothing was getting done anywhere as fast as he would have liked. He was way down the pecking order. No one was going to listen to his ideas. So, he decided to put his ideas into practice on his own.
“Cole had a theory. His specialist area was hematology. He’d been running hundreds of tests on the subject’s blood. And he was sure he was on to something. A blood transfusion from an invisible could, with the proper encouragement and a little bit of hit and miss, engender the desired reaction in a normal human.”
Sophia swiftly turned to Ben. “Figure of speech. Please, take no offense from that, Benjamin.”
“None taken,” he said.
“To prove his theory,” Sophia continued, “Cole needed lab rats. Willing or otherwise. The thing about this top-secret base, is that there was more than one top-secret project going on at this point in time. One of these projects involved the development of a new stealth helicopter, which had not been going according to plan. In testing, a squad of Green Berets had been left critically injured. The soldiers were being treated in a medical wing adjacent to where Project Clear was being conducted, and Cole managed to obtain security clearance. The men were in induced comas while they recovered, which presented him with the perfect solution.”
The SUV slowed slightly. Ben looked up and saw Kane exchanging another of his looks with Erikson. If Cole was aware, he was ignoring it. But then he had other things to contend with. Namely the big steel spit in his shoulder. The pallor on his face and the sweat cascading down it suggested the pain hadn’t faded any.
“The level to which these injured men were ignored and neglected over the ensuing weeks is an indictment of just how expendable you Special Forces guys actually are. Cole paid them visits every other day, unchallenged, as the CCTV footage later revealed, injecting them with all kind of cocktails he’d cooked up, from the stocks of invisible blood he’d been secretly harvesting.
“For weeks he had no success. Then one day he shows up at the coma ward to discover one of the soldiers gone. Not invisible. Not yet. Just not in his bed.
“The bathroom door opens and the soldier stumbles out, disorientated, distressed and midway through the transition. Its coming on has somehow brought him out of his coma. He lays eyes on the scientist, sees the white coat and must assume he’s a doctor. He reaches out for help. What must be going through his mind. The experience overwhelms him; he slumps to his knees, the transformation keeps on, spreading rapidly through his body. After a few seconds, save for his gown, he’s completely gone.
“Cole stands there. Can’t believe he’s done it. Then he must realize the guy could come to at any second. Bundles him back into bed and sedates him with something heavy enough to make it look to anyone who comes poking, which doesn’t happen a lot I assure you, like he’s still in a coma.
“In the end though, Cole’s success was short-lived. The soldier only stayed invisible for thirty seconds that first time. Not that it deterred him. After that, instead of visiting the soldiers once a day, he went every opportunity he got. He tested out more potent variants of the compound, achieving faster and longer transformations all the time.”
Ben was all ears. Cole’s head had dipped. He was fading, his breathing taxed, but was still clearly in great pain.
She leaned forward and pointed over Kane’s shoulder at a supermarket parking lot. She directed him into a space where the bulbs in the overhead lights were out, and signaled for him to kill the engine. “Until he pushed it past the point of no return,” she continued.
“They didn’t come back,” Ben said.
Sophia nodded.
“What does that mean?” Kane probed.
She made a gentle gesture, inviting Ben to fill in the blanks for the soldiers.
“The invisible blood takes over,” he said.
“Close enough, Ben,” said Sophia. “Bravo.”
“Wait,” said Kane, straightening up in his seat and turning around to Sophia for clarity. “They stayed invisible?”
“As far as anyone could tell,” said Sophia.
Erikson scratched at his arm like there was something under it he wanted out. “As far as anyone ‘could tell’.”
“Cole panicked when it happened. He couldn’t risk the men being discovered. So he covered his tracks. Disposed of the evidence. It wouldn’t have been hard. No one’s going to stop you wheeling an empty gurney down the hall.”
Sophia paused. Kane and Erikson were wound up tight, ready to snap.
“No one on the med wing asked any questions. You have to understand, and I guess you guys probably do, that personnel – especially expendable personnel – disappear off military bases all the time with no explanation. So many people keeping secrets from each other, everyone with varying degrees of need-to-know. Cole was able to get away with murder. Quite literally.”
“What about the other soldiers?” Kane asked.
“They… disappeared. All of them,” said Sophia. “Became known as the ‘ghosts’ in certain circles. Not long after they vanished, so too did the scientist. Reassigned, we were told.”
“It was brushed under the carpet,” said Kane.
“My belief,” said Sophia, “was that Cole somehow smuggled those soldiers off that base. I imagine they were secreted away somewhere, where he was able to continue his work unimpeded. Five or six live invisible subjects would have provided ample blood supplies for him to perfect his compound, for a good while anyway, while he sought out fresh subjects to test it on.”
Kane punched the headrest of Cole’s seat hard and the scientist flinched. “You toe rag, Cole. That’s what we were?”
He was still conscious. Just about.
“You shooting us up with the same garbage you gave those guys?” Erikson snarled, grabbing Cole from behind by the collar.
“No, he’s perfected the formula now,” said Sophia, touching Ben on the shoulder again. “Now he’s discovered a perfectly pure blood supply to draw upon.”
The hairs stood across Ben’s invisible back. He did see eye to eye with Kane on one thing. Cole was quite the toe rag.
“The soldiers,” said Cole. It was taking everything he had to put
the words together. “They’re alive. I can… I can show...” He coughed hard, tried to cover his mouth, but hadn’t the strength to lift his working hand. Bloody spit dribbled from the side of his mouth and rolled down on to his chin.
“Where they are?” Sophia finished the sentence for him. “I think I can find them on my own.”
Cole’s head lolled forward.
“Is he dead?” asked Ben.
“Not yet,” said Sophia.
She pulled up her sleeve. “I’m just going to help him on his way,” she said, looking up at the two ex Special Forces men. “Unless there are any objections?”
Kane shook his head slightly. Erikson just stared back.
“Okay then,” Sophia said. “What I told you earlier, about the failsafe I installed in my modification to the nanotech? This will demonstrate.”
She made a couple of taps on the tablet and swiped her finger across the screen.
Cole sat bolt upright at once. The veins in his neck stood out like chords. His teeth clenched, his eyes bulged. He convulsed with such force that he wrenched himself free of the metal shard pinning him to his seat. He hit his head violently on the ceiling before collapsing forward in a heap into the foot well. He shook like he was being electrocuted for a few seconds, then became still.
There was silence in the cabin.
“Jesus,” said Erikson.
“That it?” said Kane.
Ben didn’t say a word.
“Not quite,” Sophia answered.
Kane leaned down and put his fingers to Cole’s neck, trying for a pulse. “Now he’s dead.”
“Yes, but we need to get him out of here. Quickly. He’s going to make quite a mess very soon,” she said. “The dumpsters behind the strip mall there will do.”
“That’s crazy,” said Kane. “I thought you were worried about evidence.”
“It’s only a matter of time before he’s found,” said Erikson.
“He won’t be.”
“How can you-“ Kane started.
“He. Won’t. Be,” said Sophia.
“Okay, lady,” Kane shrugged, turning to Ben. “Don’t just sit there, Wonderboy, you can help. It’s not as if anyone’s going to see you,” he sneered.
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