Sophia was sat upright in her seat facing him. “You look… better,” she said.
“I, em, feel… better,” he answered. “How long was I out?”
“A few hours.”
“A few hours? Did you get anything to eat?”
Sophia shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that kind of airline.”
He began to laugh, but it was cut short as the plane began to descend.
“We’re on approach,” Kane hollered out to them.
Ben gritted his teeth and stayed looking at Sophia, trying to tap into whatever wavelength she was generating her composure on to distract his mind.
It must have worked on some level, because next thing he knew, the plane was rumbling along the runway.
All the talk of bases and facilities had Ben visualizing some sprawling campus through the windowless walls of the plane. But when Erikson opened the cabin door, the reality couldn’t have been more different.
They were in a desert.
Directly in front of them there was a hangar. To the right of that, at the end of the runway there was a one-story building. No windows. No nothing. Featureless. The structure resembled a concrete igloo.
“Well this is it,” said Kane, gesturing like a game show host.
It may have been the middle of the desert, but the night air gushing into the cabin was like an arctic blast.
The silence out on the runway was complete. There were no lights or any other signs of life anywhere in the distance. With the aircraft powered down and its lights off, it was hard to define much.
As they walked closer to the igloo, Ben started to figure it for a bomb shelter. Maybe a vault, if the entrance was anything to go by. The door belonged on the deck of a battleship. A large, heavy, solid steel affair with a massive lock that opened only after Kane had slid a pass card through the slot in the wall next to it.
Erikson hefted the door open and ushered the party inside. The space Ben found himself in was a like a meat locker. His breath expelled in front of his face like cigarette smoke. It wasn’t something he experienced much in South Florida.
Kane worked his way through an array of switches and, one by one, fluorescent overheads sparked into life along the corridor. “Come on, this way,” he said, leading them down the steeply inclined hall to a pair of industrial looking elevator doors.
“What do you need an elevator for in a one-story building?” said Ben.
Sophia looked at him. “This was once a missile silo.”
“That’s right,” said Kane. He inserted the key card into the wall with purpose. Far below them, there was movement in the bowels of the building. “It goes down fifteen stories.”
“Anyone else here?” asked Sophia.
“Not that I’ve ever seen, or that Cole told us about,” said Erikson. “Far as we were led to believe, the facility is unmanned. All of the systems are automated.”
The rumbling behind the metal doors increased as the elevator car climbed toward them.
“Why isn’t the car up on this floor, if there are no actual personnel?”
“Default setting,” said Kane. “The way Cole programmed it.”
“When were you last out here?” she asked.
“Couple days ago,” he said. “But we’ve never been further than this point. Only Cole ever went below. Always got us to stand by here until he was ready to leave. Security protocols, he said.”
“I think he had a good reason not to take you guys down there with him,” said Sophia, “but the only security it had anything to do with was his own.”
There was a squeal and a heavy clunk as the elevator car drew level and settled. Ben took a small step back as the doors parted. It was empty.
The car found the bottom of the elevator shaft in a way that made them all stumble. It had not been designed with passenger comfort in mind.
The doors opened into an octagonal reception area. Several corridors sprouted off it, downwards, like spokes from the hub in a bicycle wheel. The archway over the entrance to each was marked with easy-to-understand icons. Ben had seen the likes in hospitals and colleges before. One corridor led to a canteen. Another to an infirmary. There were signs for a shower block.
One of the passages stood out from the rest by having another vault-like door blocking their path. There was no keypad or visible locking mechanism. Just what looked like a viewfinder, positioned on the wall at light switch height.
“Retina scan,” said Erikson. “And I guess Cole’s retinas are what it’s looking for.”
“Well that’s that then,” muttered Kane.
Sophia ignored him and started sliding icons around on the screen of her wrist-mounted computer. She closed her eyes and then opened them again, wide, stepping up to the wall scanner. Half a second later there was a positive chirp sound followed by a loud click as the lock opened.
“The nanotech in your eye,” said Ben. “You got it to fool the scanner into thinking you were Cole.”
She just shrugged and gestured at the mercenaries to lead the way.
The end of the corridor opened into a large round room set out with much sturdier, less pretty looking versions of the equipment Cole had in his Miami base. Industrial refrigerator units were stocked with hundreds of vials and test tubes, with dates printed on them going back several years.
But the big difference lay in the center of the room.
Arranged uniformly in a twelve-point star formation, there were what looked like sun beds from a tanning salon. The hoods were open in the raised position on five of the capsules.
Sophia strode over to one of the closed units and quickly wiped away the condensation on the glass. Her expression changed and the muscles in her face tightened. She advanced on to the next capsule.
The glass on the first unit had already begun to fog up again by the time Ben reached it. He wiped it clear and took a few moments to process what he was looking at, before moving on to the others after Sophia.
There were twelve pods in all, of which five were empty, the lids open.
In the remaining seven lay what Ben guessed had become of the Green Berets Cole had experimented on.
But soldiers were anything but what the men resembled.
33
“You’ll have to slow down there, Major Powell,” said Crane. “That’s a whole lot of information for me to process this early in the morning.”
The colonel was speaking from his office at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In just over an hour Powell would be talking to his commanding officer face to face, but for now he had to make do with a laptop screen on board a U.S. Army transport. Powell could have waited to land before he briefed Crane, but there simply wasn’t the time.
“So let me get this straight,” said the colonel. “The boy is alive.”
“He’s with Cole,” said Powell.
“Cole.” Crane recited the name like he was running it against a filing system in his head. “The mad scientist. If you weren’t able to find the boy, then how the hell did he?”
“With a whole lot of help. The operation he was running in Miami wasn’t cheap. Someone is bankrolling him.”
Crane looked into the camera with a thousand-mile stare. “I should think someone is,” he remarked with more than a little irritation in his voice. It was of course all down to Cole’s actions that Project Clear was shut down. It took a whole lot for Crane and Powell not to be shut down with it.
“You suspect terrorist involvement?” Crane asked.
“I did. We found a couple of dead mercs out in the glades who could have had ties.”
“Working for Cole?”
“I don’t think so. More like working for his buyer. Given the evidence at the scene, it was a product demonstration.”
Crane’s eyebrows climbed almost to his hairline. “Don’t tell me: Invisible soldiers. Jesus H. He’s succeeded?” The colonel’s hands, which were resting on the desk in front of him, clenched into fists.
“I believe so. A
nd it must be stable. Because he’s using the compound himself,” said Powell.
There was a pause. “The boy the reason behind Cole’s success, you think?” said Crane.
“Everything points to it,” said Powell. “Until now, all he’s had to work with has been whatever blood he got from the soldiers at Clear. Without Eve’s or Ben’s, he’s just been guessing, trying to fill in the blanks.”
“This literally couldn’t be any worse for us,” said Crane.
“Oh, it could. There’s one other thing.”
“Christ,” said Crane. “Go on.”
“Sophia Woods is alive. I think she may well have been the one helping Cole to track down the boy. She could be the one backing him. She has the contacts.”
“How’d you come to that conclusion?”
“Everyone’s been trying to hitch a ride on the nanotech bandwagon. The big medicals. The pharmaceuticals. The weapons developers,” said Powell. “All looking for a leg up on the opposition. She was the biggest name in the business.”
“And if it’s for nefarious purposes, the fact she’s supposed to be dead would have only made her even more attractive to work with,” said Crane.
“Money would not be an issue,” said Powell.
“But I don’t get it. What you told me about the last day in The Nest. She wanted to kill the mother and boy. To stamp out the invisibles before they got a chance to breed. Now you tell me she’s in league with a guy who’s trying to do just that? It doesn’t check out.”
“Sophia runs on logic,” said Powell. “The woman thinks like a computer. I don’t think she has had a change of heart at all, Colonel. I believe she’s still firmly on course. She’s just choosing a very duplicitous route to get there. Financing Cole means she can keep a very close eye on everything he is doing, and it puts her in a perfect position to tie up all the remaining loose ends.”
On screen, Crane raised his hands. “Again, Powell, slow down.”
“I’m talking about the ghosts. Cole’s guinea pigs.”
“Come on, Powell. The soldiers? You’re not going to tell me you think they’re alive too. Jesus, is anyone dead?”
“Colonel, you just shut Project Clear down and had us all walk away, brush the whole sorry mess under the carpet before anyone noticed. We mounted no search or recovery operation. It was out of sight, out of mind. Because you couldn’t see these guys, you convinced yourself they no longer existed.”
“You think they’re still alive, hiding out in a cave somewhere?”
“Not a cave exactly, no.” Powell held up the portable drive loaded with the data from Cole’s system in Miami. “Cole had himself a hell of an operation. From what I’ve seen of his M.O., he’s got to have a second base out there somewhere. A back-up.” He turned the drive over in his palm. “But I’m going to need help decrypting the information on this to pinpoint its location.”
“You’ve got it. Whatever you need, Major. I was sorry to hear about your team. Dyson and Morgan were good men. Really.”
“Thank you,” said Powell. “They were. And I’d appreciate it if their deaths weren’t in vain.”
“I’ll do everything I can to make that the case,” said Crane.
“Time is not on our side. Sophia’s going to move fast. I need a tech every bit as thorough and fast as Dyson to help me.”
Crane stared out of the display at Powell.
“Well?” said Powell.
“Just hang on a moment,” the colonel said. “Why are we in such a rush?”
Powell’s jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”
“Hear me out,” said Crane. “This has always been about gaining control of the situation. Ascertaining how much of a risk the invisibles posed, and then minimizing it.”
“That’s not what it’s always been about at all.”
“If you think Defense gave the green light to have its facilities used for some science project then, frankly, Jason, you were being stupid.”
“What about Human Rights?” said Powell. “Is this great nation not supposed to champion that cause?”
“Not at the expense of National Security, no,” said Crane. “I think as the events of the program bore out, the subject-“
“Eve,” Powell interrupted.
Crane ignored him. “The subject posed a threat. Perhaps not directly, but a threat nonetheless. Cole was only a small example of what could happen.”
“But we were working on a cure, Crane. A means of controlling the condition.”
“The condition has turned into a situation, Jason. And the situation is way out of control.”
Powell could see exactly where they were heading.
“We can’t have a man on the loose with the means and the people to go where they want, with no fear of detection. Not in this day and age,” said Crane. “Not in any day and age. You think Woods still wants to carry out the plan she outlined to you in Louisiana? I think we should find out. The goalposts have moved, Major. Conclusive steps have to be taken here. And how convenient would it be if Dr. Woods was to take them for us.”
“Especially for you,” said Powell.
Crane sprang to his feet so fast that his chair slammed into the wall behind. “You’re damn straight, for me,” he snarled. “I’ve kept my powder dry on this situation so far. Which has been no easy task, let me tell you. But I think it’s time to light that shit up. What happened in Nevada and subsequently in Louisiana was nothing short of a disaster. And I had to pull every string I could get a hold of to make sure we didn’t get rained on from a height. I’m all out of string now, Major Powell. And now it looks like we could clear this whole little mess up without even getting our hands dirty.”
“That’s a hell of a gamble you’re taking, Colonel. What if she fails? Do you think Cole is just going to let her pull the plug?”
Crane wasn’t biting.
“You think if she does the job for you, she’s just going to disappear again and stay quiet about it?” said Powell.
He let the words soak in.
“Maybe these intervening years have taught Sophia a valuable lesson too. And by valuable, I mean financial. She’s a much smarter cookie than Cole. You know that. Imagine if her whole plan was to wrestle control of Cole’s little experiment from him. Imagine it in her hands, Crane. Paramilitaries and terrorist cells will be the least of your worries. She could sell this to an enemy government.”
Crane’s face drained. His hands dropped to the table in front of him. “You hacked into the trackers in the invisible blood before. Can we do that again?”
“I don’t have the equipment, or the sample we used before. It was destroyed with Dyson. But maybe we can find something on that drive that could lead us to them some other way.”
Powell plugged the portable drive into the side of the laptop. “I’m uploading the files to the secure server now. It would be an idea to get someone on the case now and give us a head start before I land.”
Crane just nodded, putting his phone to his ear as the screen went blank.
34
Each soldier was in a more bizarre state than the next. While Cole had initially started out using the helicopter crash survivors to test his invisibility compound, he had been irked by the fact that he could not control how and when the men reappeared. What lay in the capsules were his attempts at experimental recipes to give the subjects that ability. And it had gone wrong. Horribly.
No two were affected in the same way.
In the first pod lay what appeared to be a quadruple-amputee, bereft of arms and legs, although the sensors attached to each of the invisible limbs by means of straps told otherwise.
He was the one who got off lightly.
The second pod revealed a man who appeared to missing his skin. Somehow the compound, whatever mixture had been used in this case, had not restored it to full visibility. The man looked like a diagram from a medical journal, all exposed muscle, tissue and arteries. There were not even eyelids. His eyes were wide, h
is pupils dilated. Comatose. Better that way for all concerned. If he were to wake up and see so much as his hand, with all that bone and tissue on show, let alone see how his face looked in the mirror, who knew how he might react.
Another of the pods seemed to contain only blood, albeit in the shape of a human being, like some demonic Jell-O mold.
“Bizarre how the compound selectively makes the transformation,” Sophia said, leafing through notes left at the foot of a capsule containing what appeared to be a human skeleton. “He was trying to fine-tune the process. But with every ‘refinement’ he was making it worse. The compound was becoming more and more unstable. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, every subsequent batch more inferior in quality.”
At the last occupied pod, Ben watched as the former soldier flickered in and out of invisibility like a faulty neon light.
“His pulse,” said Sophia. “He’s phasing in and out with every beat of his heart. All of them. Their bodies are in such disrepair. I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done for them.”
Kane had gradually found his way across the floor. For a man who had likely seen all manner of injury in his time, and, doubtlessly inflicted many of them, he looked shaken. “For guys involved in a helicopter crash they don’t look too banged up. Limbs are all present and correct. The ones that we can see show no signs of burns or scarring. Kind of strange, don’t you think?”
Sophia was feeling around in the open pods, checking to see if they really were empty. “What happened to the other five men, Kane?”
“I told you. We’ve never been down here. I couldn’t tell you.”
“Maybe you can,” she said. “When was the last time you flew Cole out here?”
“I told you, two days ago.”
“After Ben had come into the picture,” Sophia mused. Cole had used his blood to fill in the gaps in his failing compound. Then he had used it on the five men, who must have been in a more useful state than the irreparably damaged souls before them.
But where were those men now?
Mr. Clear Page 18