“You know I’m right,” she said.
“No, Sophia, I don’t.”
A heavy, rapid, repeated knock came to the open door.
“Major Powell, I need to talk to you urgently.” It was Flynn, his right-hand man, and the only other person on his team with a military background, harvested from a small group of operators from the original Project Clear.
Powell held his hands up to Sophia, the best he could make at a timeout signal, and went to the door.
“Sir,” Flynn said, unable to forget military etiquette, no matter how much Powell tried to drill his first name basis code into him. “I think we have a bit of a situation.”
He hurried away down the hall. Powell gave one glance back in at Sophia, who was staring into space, then followed. Out in the main common area, Powell saw that the door at the top of the spiral staircase to the plantation house above was open. When he joined Flynn on ground level, he was quickly left in no doubt as to what was worrying the man.
Sure, it had been raining a lot over the last few days. It was hurricane season after all. This time of year, wind and rain was to be expected. And judging by the surrounding vegetation and the condition of the terrain, the water level in the swamp could climb quite a bit.
But this was extreme.
The ground at the bottom of the porch was under two feet of water. And rising visibly.
“The levies have burst,” said Flynn. “There’s a mini Tsunami coming our way. Imminently. We need to get to higher ground. Or, better yet, into the air. We have to evacuate now.” Water spilled over on to the porch and flowed over the doorframe. “Major,” Flynn pressed, “You need to call in an extraction.”
“Go secure the family. Move them as high as you can. Up into the attic space, if the floorboards can take it,” he whispered. “We need to buy all the time we can get. I’ll go for the radio, and see if I can raise a chopper.”
They descended back into The Nest.
Flynn went to fetch the family from their quarters as Sophia met Powell in the hall.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Just like you said, Doctor Woods, we need to go.”
He went to take her hand, only for her to pull away and point the gun held in it right at him.
“No, we don’t. Jason, this is perfect. The hurricane. The water. Nature can set things right for us.”
“Sophia, you are not thinking straight. Now is not the time. Let’s discuss this later.”
“If we go back, there won’t be a later,” she said.
Flynn returned, the words to address Powell forming on his lips, and Sophia shot him dead center in the forehead.
She pointed the weapon at Powell again.
“Oh my God, Sophia,” he said. “What have you done?”
“I have to do this, Jason. You’re the one not thinking straight. I’m sorry. There’s just, there’s no other way.” She shook her head and fired two rounds into his shoulder in quick succession. The first bullet stunned him. The second sent his body into shutdown. His legs went out from under him and he collapsed to the floor like a house of cards.
Sophia stepped over him and started off in the direction Flynn had come.
Her footsteps faded down the hall, gunshots from the Glock she was wielding ringing out sporadically, then he heard her out climbing the spiral staircase.
Sophia had heard his orders to Flynn.
She knew where he’d stowed mother and son. There was no time to go to the weapons locker.
Powell choked down the pain and willed himself to his feet.
Water cascaded over him as he climbed to the surface, where he found the ground floor besieged by flowing water.
The original house was in poor structural condition already. The walls were crumbling; the staircase was rotting. How long would the building hold out in this?
Over the din of the rushing water, he could hear Sophia calling Ben’s name above. The storm camouflaged his careful footfalls up the creaking steps onto the second floor landing.
She didn’t see him. Too busy testing door handles and looking up at the ceiling, trying to find the way into the attic.
Sophia rounded the corner.
His having no weapon, while she had a gun she was very prepared to use, meant he needed the element of surprise. He picked up speed and turned the corner to find her about to try the very last door up here, the one she was looking for.
He launched himself at her, his momentum propelling them both through the rotten shutter at the end of the short corridor out on to the shallowly sloped roof of the house. The water was rising even more rapidly now, already up to what was left of the guttering at its base.
Sophia landed on her back and began sliding down the incline toward the raging water. She screamed for help from Powell and he found himself reaching out to her.
He caught hold of her with his good hand, just before she tumbled out of range, and wrenched her up to him, using a grip on the house’s old stone-built chimneystack with his weakened one for purchase. Running on fumes now, the last move he could muster was to sit himself against the stack, Sophia scrambling up his body like a ladder on her hands and knees and wrapping her arms around him.
The water was now working its way up the incline of the roof.
She looked him in the face, rain streaming down her face.
“I’m so sorry, Jason,” she said.
Powell was beginning to think she might have come to her senses.
“We can only hope,” she continued, gasping to catch her breath and looking up at the small window under the roof’s apex, “that the water completes the job for us.”
She let go of Powell and tried to crabwalk across the slates, but he grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her back, some of them falling away. He looked down at the water and then up at the window himself.
Ben was up there, he knew, looking right back at him.
There was nothing he could do for them now. But Sophia was determined, fighting to free herself of his grasp. The water would be on both of them soon. Powell knew he hadn’t the strength left in his arms to hold on to the chimney, or her, for much longer. And he couldn’t risk her escaping him again and making it to the window.
“Well I guess you’ll just have to keep on hoping,” he said, and noting that Sophia was holding on to nothing but him, used his last ounce of energy to push them both out into the torrent of water.
Sophia screamed, more out of frustration than fear, and let go of him instantly, the swirling current pulling them apart in different directions, away from the house.
She tried to swim against the current, back to where she had been, but was quickly consumed by the water, while Powell grabbed on, exhausted, to a piece of driftwood.
***
When he woke up in a military hospital more than a week later, severely dehydrated, bruised head to toe, with two nine-millimeter bullet wounds healing in his shoulder, all he could think of was Eve and Ben.
What had happened to them?
Colonel Crane visited with him for a full debriefing. He dispatched the helicopter and rescue team Powell never got a chance to scramble. The plantation house, just as he feared, had been swept away. The team located what was left of The Nest, but found no signs of life. Invisible or otherwise.
Powell resigned himself to the fact that they were both dead. The odds of finding any bodies were zero in the aftermath of the storm and flood. How would you go about finding a body you couldn’t even see?
Crane took Powell’s version of events at face value.
He had no reason not to, although he had been less than impressed at Powell’s radio silence in the intervening years.
But Powell’s story wasn’t all Crane believed. He put a lot of credence in Sophia’s hypothesis; that the invisibles would pose a serious threat if they were ever to get in with the wrong crowd.
As much as Crane voiced his regrets upon hearing of the family’s demise, Powell couldn’t help feeling his
commander was happy about it. If he couldn’t have them, nobody would.
Crane was very interested in Sophia’s theory that the soldiers Cole had experimented might still be still alive. In the eight years Powell had been underground with his invisibles, the men’s family homes had been staked out and bugged to high heaven, to no avail.
In time, Crane put Powell in charge of a specially selected task force, their mission to find Lucas Cole and uncover the whereabouts of those soldiers.
A detailed profile of Cole had been drawn up and a great deal of background had been gathered on him. While some who had worked with Cole viewed him as a solo player, others saw him as independent and thought that he exhibited real initiative.
Cole’s loner status made it difficult for the task force to get a bead on him. With no surviving family to speak of, and no known dependents, or even friends, to lean on, there were no leads. In the months prior to detection of his extracurricular activity outside of Project Clear, he had emptied his bank account and liquefied his assets, effectively removing himself from the grid.
A deep dive into Cole’s work history set alarm bells ringing.
Although recruited as a specialist in hematology for Project Clear, Cole had previously worked for biotechnology companies involved in weapons development projects abroad. Cole had shaken hands with a lot of men throughout the years who had been later exposed as terrorists and were now serving time in prisons or, more often than not, serving dictatorial leaders in increasingly unstable middle-eastern countries.
Still, even knowing what they did, searching for Cole was like looking for a very small needle in a field full of very large haystacks.
Today, Powell had come close, but at what cost?
The tables had turned. Drastically. Here Powell was, hiding out, armed with nothing but a stone cold cup of untouched coffee. Now Cole was the one pursuing him, with a task force of his own, and an invisible he thought dead, along with the one person who had seemingly wanted all invisibles dead.
The pieces just didn’t add up.
Through the entrance of the diner walked a plain-clothes operative looking exactly like a soldier trying to pass himself off as a civilian. Powell caught his eye and the man did an immediate about-turn.
Hopefully, on the way to see Crane he would find a way to put those mismatching pieces together. Before it was too late.
32
The pick-up truck Kane commandeered from the construction site looked like it had left the assembly line some time in the previous century, and was so battered it may even have been the century before that.
The shape of some big construction worker’s butt was sculpted into the cushion of the rear bench like a bad memory. The smell of stale sweat and cigarette smoke hung in the air so thick, Ben could almost chew it. “Nice ride,” he said.
“Nice and anonymous,” said Kane. “It’ll be just as invisible as you.”
Sophia turned to Ben. “We need to get you to a safe place.”
“What do you mean?” he asked her.
“You need to understand: Jason is not the man you grew up under. Back in Louisiana, his mission was keeping you alive. Now, it’s the very opposite. The people Powell work for; they do not want your existence or your story to be revealed to the world.”
“Well that’s completely fine by me,” said Ben. “I don’t want it revealed either.”
“What you want doesn’t come into it, Ben. They’re going to make that decision for you. They’ll do everything they can to remove you from the equation completely,” she said.
“They want to kill me,” he said, surprising himself with his own measured tone.
“What people don’t understand, they’re afraid of,” said Sophia.
“But Jason knows what I am,” said Ben, “and who I am.”
“That doesn’t come into it anymore,” said Sophia. “You forget, Ben. Jason Powell is a soldier. Whether he wears a uniform or not. His job is to follow orders. And right now, those orders are to kill any invisible he can find. He’s coming for you, Ben. Then he’s going to hunt down those soldiers Cole abused. They’re innocent men, Ben, just like you. None of you deserve to die. I won’t let it happen. I did what I had to do before, that last day in The Nest. And I’ll do it again.”
“Okay, we’re set,” said Kane, climbing into the front seat of the pick-up.
“Where to?” he asked Sophia.
“I don’t know where we need to go,” Sophia answered. “But you do.”
Kane and Erikson exchanged glances.
“Yeah. I think we do,” said Erikson.
“It’s a long way from here,” said Kane. “Cole only had us take him out to the place once every couple of weeks. Last time was two days ago. But he never took us inside.”
“The Green Berets,” said Erikson. “That where Cole’s been keeping them all this time?”
“He would have needed regular access to them,” said Sophia. “To keep them alive.”
Kane started the engine. Whoever was responsible for the vehicle had been thoughtful enough to stay true to the movies and leave the keys under the sun visor. Who in the real world actually did a stupid thing like that? But then who in the real world thought the invisible man was actually existed?
The pick-up rolled out of the construction site. It was Friday night. Chances were the heap wouldn’t be reported missing, if at all judging by the state of the thing, until Monday morning.
“You don’t have to come with us, Ben, if you don’t want to,” said Sophia. “I want you to know that, from this point on, if you wish, you’re free.”
“But you said you could help me.”
“If that’s what you really want.”
“It is. Believe me.”
Sophia’s eyes widened and she let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that,” she said. “Because I could really do with your help for this next leg of the journey. I don’t know what state of mind these men will be in, and it would be good to have an expert along to help me talk to them. If you know what I mean.”
“I think I do,” Ben said. “And I want to help you. In a way, if it wasn’t for me, and my mother, those men wouldn’t be in the position they’re in.”
“Your mother didn’t ask to be discovered. She was doing everything she could not to. And she certainly didn’t volunteer for Cole’s pet project, which as I think is clear now, couldn’t have got as far as it did without some input or knowledge on Jason’s part.”
Ben didn’t answer. He just searched for holes in her logic for the next half hour, until the pick-up rattled to a stop in front of a barrier. All he could make out in the darkness was a high, wired fence and a gate topped with razor wire. Beyond, there were the outlines of what looked like warehouse buildings.
Kane lowered the window as the beam from a flashlight found the vehicle and read its license plate. A man in a creased guard’s uniform ambled warily up to the vehicle with a clipboard. As soon as he caught sight of the driver’s face, he jogged to the barrier without so much as a word and hefted it open by hand.
When they drove through, Ben saw that the buildings were not warehouses, but hangars. This was an airfield, with a handful of small, single engine aircraft sitting on the grass.
Apart from the guard, there didn’t seem to be anybody else around. Hardly surprising, considering the late hour. These planes were of the recreational variety, and nobody went flying at night for fun.
Pulling up outside the last hangar, Kane came out with a small clicker. Strip lighting inside and outside the building flickered into life, and the gates rolled back to reveal a small passenger jet.
“Cole had an arrangement with them here,” said Kane. “Bird’s constantly prepped and ready to take off. We can be wheels up inside ten.”
Within five, the jet engines were idling and Ben was struggling to buckle himself into one of the plastic bucket seats lining the wall of the cabin. The thing might have looked like a luxury private jet on the outside, but inside
it was strictly business, stripped down to the bare minimum, with no call for the plush, upholstered seating Ben had been expecting to see.
“It gets better with practice,” said Sophia, seeing him wrestle with the buckles and straps.
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“You’ve never flown before, have you?”
“I’ve looked around planes before. Didn’t fancy it. They’re too cramped for my taste. Imagine the panic if someone bumped into me over the Atlantic.”
“You have a point.” She unclipped her own seatbelt and showed Ben how to do up his.
The noise from the engines increased and the plane moved off out of the hangar, on to the tarmac.
Through the open door to the cockpit, Ben could see Kane and Erikson flicking switches and muttering checks to each other, in a routine that sounded like it had been run through a hundred times.
They taxied for what seemed like miles before the aircraft made a U-turn and came to a stop. Then the drone from the engines through the walls of the fuselage escalated to a deafening roar. Kane fed the throttle and they started off down the runway.
Ben closed his eyes tight and pictured the photograph he had supposedly happened upon in Cole’s control room.
His mother. Visible. Had it been genuine? Or just another well-engineered lie Cole had come up with to reel him in?
Sophia had been in the picture too.
He could ask her.
But his train of thought derailed as the plane lifted into the air. The sensation was more off-putting than he had expected. Climbing gradually one second and then dropping like a stone the next. He gripped the sides of his seat so tight that he was sure he would break his own fingers. Never had he wanted to have his bare feet on solid ground more.
***
Ben awoke with a jolt. He was still in the airplane cabin, but at least the thing wasn’t bouncing around like a tennis ball anymore. He touched his chest. It was damp; the lingering after-effects of the fevered sweat he had been in before he passed out.
Mr. Clear Page 17