Mr. Clear

by Stewart, Graham

  Sophia was on the case. She tapped at the keyboard of an adjacent computer terminal, bringing it to life, and shuttled through a succession of menus, calling up various chemical compound structures. She found the most recent ones and studied the data closely, becoming increasingly frustrated the more of it she digested.

  “Cole, how could you have been so damn stupid?” she said, wheeling around to address Erikson and Kane. “This compound is the one he administered to the men from those capsules. It’s the same stuff you’ve both got coursing through your veins. With one difference. It doesn’t have any transmitters in it. Not a single tracking unit. Cole saw fit to remove them.”

  There was some sign of recollection in Kane’s face. “I heard him discussing that with Burke. They cooked up a batch minus the bugs. Burke thought the tech might have been polluting the compound.”

  “The idiot,” Sophia said.

  Her eyes drifted to the ceiling and the camera mounted on it. Sophia closed out of the files on the computer and found her way into the system monitoring the building’s security. She called up the footage recorded on the camera and shuttled through the timeline.

  Ben saw the capsule lids open in unison and, in a few sped-up minutes, the vault door-like exit follow suit.

  “The soldiers got out,” said Erikson.

  “They were let out,” said Sophia.

  “This place isn’t big enough for five men to hide in. Invisible or not,” said Kane. “They have to be out in the open.”

  Erikson leaned over Sophia and cycled through the CCTV cameras on the network until he found the one he was after. “The hangar,” he said.

  There were two tarps in the center of the screen. One was wrapped around a vehicle, nice and tight. The other lay discarded in a heap on the ground, the bonds that had tied it in place lying next to it, severed.

  “They’re mobile,” said Sophia.

  “Very,” said Erikson.

  “Those men cannot be discovered,” said Sophia. “You two need to get after them, and bring them back.”

  “Fine by me,” said Kane. “I could do with some air.”

  Erikson followed him without a word. Sophia monitored their exit on the computer, ensuring all doors were locked behind them. Clearly there was the potential for the five newly invisible soldiers to double back.

  Ben found himself drawn back to the remaining pods, to Cole’s numerous failed attempts at perfecting his ‘weapon’. These men were neither one thing nor the other, one foot in each world, stuck in a living hell. “Can’t you help them?” Ben asked. “You said you had it all figured out. And these guys aren’t fully gone, the way I am.”

  “Your cell structure. Your DNA. It’s physically and chemically sound. But these men? Their cell structures have been vandalized, their DNA corrupted.”

  She looked down at the occupants of the capsules for the longest time and threw her hands up, flashing half a smile at Ben. “You know what? I’ll give it a try. I have everything I need here. It would be unwise in any case to test the procedure on you first. And as bad as it sounds, the truth is these guys have nothing to lose.”

  35

  Powell and Crane watched as the tech negotiated his way around the safeguards Dyson had installed on the portable hard drive. Not quite the archetypal vision of a computer scientist, Tennant looked like he spent far too much time in the gym. He had started out with the bravado of a wrestling superstar, boasting about his hacking skills. But he had been made to look very human in the last two hours, which was a whole one hour and fifty minutes more than he had told them it would take to breach Dyson’s measures. Powell felt a sense of loss, and more than a little pride. Even dead, his man had put Crane’s best to shame.

  The jumble of code on the screen was replaced by a list of folders and filenames. Tennant’s shoulders relaxed and there was an audible sigh of relief. He cleared his throat and said, “Your friend Cole was a busy little boy.”

  “I don’t want to know what he was,” said Powell. “I want to know where he is.”

  Tennant began sifting through the hard drive’s files.

  Powell angled his head at Crane. “There has to be another set-up somewhere. Somewhere permanent. There was no trace of the ghosts at the Miami Port site. Moving them around constantly just wouldn’t be feasible. Way too risky.”

  “If they’re even all still alive,” said Crane.

  The thought had crossed Powell’s mind.

  “This is interesting,” said Tennant. “Just sitting there in an unlocked admin folder, not deep down in one of the encrypted ones.”

  Powell leaned forward, resting the palms of his hands on the desk to peer closer at the screen. “What is it?”

  “It’s a billing statement for a private airfield in Fort Lauderdale. Looks like Cole has a hangar leased out there under his first name,” said Tennant. “Lucas.”

  “What are these?” said Crane, running his finger down a column of figures.

  “They seem to be costs associated with the servicing and refueling of an aircraft. And judging by the engine parts, a Learjet.”

  “You can tell by the names of the parts? You a plane nut or something?” said Crane.

  “I know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff,” he replied. “Check it out. Airfield has got a website. And if they’ve got that…” He whirled around to the station next to him. The console was displaying an operating system the likes of which Powell had not seen before. “Then I’ve got them.”

  Tennant cracked his knuckles and went at the keyboard. Lines of code streamed down the screen. “I’m in the flight manifests,” said Tennant. “Nothing for Lucas. Ever. For a plane that gets refueled and maintained, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Everything’s being kept strictly off the books.”

  Crane grabbed the phone off the desk and dialed the airfield’s number, reading it from the foot of the webpage. It rang out on the first two attempts. On the third, someone couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  The only person up there appeared to be a night watchman. The airfield was strictly a daytime leisure operation. He didn’t seem to know anything about any small jet or off-the-book arrangement, or know of any Lucas Cole. Until Crane mentioned the NSA and talk of The Patriot Act. Then it all came back to him.

  Cole’s group had been there around four hours ago and immediately taken off. Where for, he promised Crane through his tears before the colonel hung up, he really didn’t know.

  “A plane,” said Powell. “We have to assume that wherever he’s heading is more than a day’s drive away. Jet wouldn’t make sense keeping on standby otherwise.”

  “Hell of a risk in the air with radar,” said Crane.

  “Not really,” said Powell. “By now I reckon they’ve got to wherever they were going. Four hours of radar footage? It would take ten times that to pick them out of all the other hundreds of planes in the sky and see where they went. We don’t even know what direction they headed.”

  “Maybe they had no choice but to travel by air,” Tennant ventured without looking away from the screen. “This is a big old country. Plenty of remote places with no road access.”

  “Exactly what kind of places are we talking about here?” asked Crane.

  “Some heavily forested area maybe. A mountain range. My guess would be a desert,” said Tennant. “More likelihood of a readymade runway to accommodate the Lear.”

  “A desert,” said Crane. “What about a military base? Plenty of derelicts about now. These guys would know where to find them.”

  “A whole base? Too big. Too conspicuous,” said Powell.

  “Speaking of derelicts,” said Tennant. “You know you can buy old missile silos? Some of the disused ones are still owned by Uncle Sam, but some were sold and are in private ownership. They’re all listed right there on the net. Like on real estate sites. Hell, some have even been converted into houses. Though you’d have to be one paranoid son of a bitch to want to live underground.”

  “Sounds perfect,” s
aid Powell. “A missile silo. Tennant, show me one of those lists.”

  The tech brought up a map of the United States dotted with graphic icons in the shape of poster pins. “Each of them’s an old launch site. They’re all over Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.”

  “Unless Cole’s developed a means of invisibly central heating his test subjects out in the open,” said Powell, “I’d rule out everything that far north this time of year.”

  “Okay,” said Tennant, zooming in until all that was visible were the southern states. There were still more than a dozen possibles across the country.

  “What now?” the tech asked.

  “Now we look at them,” said Powell.

  Crane made a call and seconds later they were looking at a live satellite imagery feed, which was patched through to a huge screen on the wall at the head of the room. He put the operator on speakerphone. “Give them the coordinates of the first one,” he said to Tennant.

  They started with locations in Florida and then worked their way west. Given the early hour, the United States was under the cover of varying shades of darkness. The imagery was infrared.

  After twenty minutes of looking down on the earth from four hundred and fifty miles in the sky, they had seen nothing more than massive areas of long vacated land, with the only signs of life the grey outlines of the buildings that were once inhabited.

  Then they saw something markedly different. Not far from a very small, dense concrete structure, there were two faint heat signatures. With some fine-tuning and image enhancement they could see where the heat transmissions were coming from.

  “The engine nacelles on the Lear’s tail,” said Tennant.

  “Where is that?” said Powell.

  “Middle of Nowheresville, New Mexico,” he said, checking the location out on his listing and bringing up the GPS coordinates. “Place is a relic. One of the first Minutemen missile bases to be decommissioned back in the eighties.”

  “Jesus,” said Crane. “That’s less than a hundred and fifty miles from here. Cole, you cheeky son of a bitch.”

  “Security detail?” said Powell.

  Tennant shook his head. “Why would it be needed? It’s nothing but a deep hole in the desert and a lot of concrete.”

  “I need to get out there. Now,” said Powell.

  Crane held up his hand. “Hang on. How can we be sure they’re all out there? How do we know this isn’t some complicated decoy? Be a great way to throw us off the scent, send an empty plane out there into the desert and have us chase after it.”

  The colonel had a point.

  “Let me try something,” said Tennant whirling around to the other console. “The transmitters.”

  “I told you,” said Powell. “They turned them off.”

  “To you,” said Tennant. “I think they’ve just changed the frequencies they’re operating on.”

  “Again?” said Powell. “It would figure. We had to jump high hurdles to get a fix on the last frequency. But then at least we had a blood sample with the transmitters to give us an in. How the hell are you going to pick it up now?”

  “Well,” said Tennant pointing at the satellite image on the screen, “we have a rough idea of the area in which the signal should be for a start. And this time around you have me.”

  “And that should assure me of what exactly?” said Powell.

  “I haven’t managed to hang on to my seat in this room because of my charm and good looks alone.” He cleared the screen on his terminal, pulling new file and folder windows up and throwing them around the screen like a Vegas dealer would cards on a blackjack table. “Whatever pinhead Cole had working for him was good enough to allow you download a full schematic of the modified nanotransmitter.” A three-dimensional wireframe model of the transmitter popped up on screen and Tennant rotated it. He used a stylus to deconstruct the components of the model on screen.

  Powell tried to concentrate on what the tech was doing, but the guy was on autopilot and too hard to keep up with.

  “Bingo, as the man said,” said Tennant.

  There was nothing left of the onscreen model but a tiny fragment.

  “What’s that?” asked Powell.

  He tapped the stylus on the screen and the fragment grew large in the window.

  “Stuff like this? It’s not put together with some mass-produced crap you find in RadioShack, man. This stuff is exotic. The components, rare. The stuff down the far end of the periodic table. I’m talking about Kryptonite shit here.”

  “Get to the point,” Crane growled.

  “Here’s a breakdown of the raw materials in each of the components in the nanotech.”

  “And you’ve found something in there exotic?” said Powell.

  “Oh yeah. The sort you shouldn’t find in the middle of the New Mexico desert,” replied Tennant with that same smug look Powell had seen on Dyson’s face from time to time. “It’s a crystal.”

  “Figures,” said Crane. “See-through.”

  “Spot on,” said Tennant. “But even better, you can track it like a metal if you know what to look for.”

  “And you do, I take it,” said Powell.

  “Of course.” He turned around to them. “Colonel Crane, I’m going to have to ask you to ignore what I do next. It’s kind of not entirely legal.”

  Tennant brought up a window with a command prompt. “They’re using satellites in mining and mineral exploration now in a big way. Precious metals are at a record high price. And extremely difficult to find new deposits of. At one time, they used satellites to examine surface detail to help them guess if it was a good place to dig. But the sensors these things have now can actually tell you what’s on the ground, and underneath it. They take the electromagnetic data and interpret the molecular structure-“

  Powell slammed his fist down on the desktop. “Enough,” he said. “Can you use it to find the crystal in the transmitters?”

  “I already have,” said Tennant. He moved the screen around so that Powell could see. There was a table of numbers. “The mineral is there alright. But the reading is very faint. Could be because it’s deep underground. But there’s something else,” said Tennant. “A much stronger reading, at coordinates to the northwest.”

  “Show me,” said Powell.

  Tennant called the coordinates out to the satellite operator. Seconds later they were looking down on a wide expanse of empty desert.

  “There’s nothing there,” said Crane.

  “Maybe it’s moved since you took the reading,” said Powell. “Continue the move northwest, slowly,” he called to the operator.

  Another mile or so along the same trajectory, they saw a small rectangular shape moving across the landscape. The image enlarged as the camera zoomed in closer.

  “Is that an old Jeep?” said Crane.

  “A Land Rover,” said Powell.

  The off-roader was bouncing across the rocky desert floor. The tops of two heads could be seen in the front seats.

  “Let’s see it without the infrared,” said Powell. When the image switched, they could see dawn was approaching. The Land Rover could still be seen. And so could the two heads.

  “They look like the two who were with Cole and Sophia.”

  “They’re visible,” said Crane.

  “I imagine, right now, they don’t need not to be,” said Powell. “Anyway, wouldn’t make any sense for them to be invisible driving an open top vehicle. Imagine if they bumped into anyone out there.

  “The faint reading at the silo must be Ben. If he was in the vehicle we’d have seen his heat signature. He’s too valuable for Cole to let out of his sight, so to speak, so odds are he and Sophia are right there with him.”

  Crane nodded his head at the Land Rover, navigating its way across the desert terrain. “So where are these guys off to?”

  “I have no idea,” said Powell. “But I know this. Getting near that place is going to be tricky. Cole couldn’t have chosen a better place strategically to hide o
ut. They’ll see us coming from miles off. And I’m going to need those two to get me inside.”

  “Well I think I have just the thing to help us out there,” said Crane. “But there’s going to be a catch.”

  36

  Unlike its more modern counterparts, the Land Rover had none of those electronic luxuries that were liable to malfunction out in the field. Things like power steering for example.

  “They don’t make them like this no more,” said Kane, wrestling with the wheel.

  “With good reason,” said Erikson.

  The road in front of them, or what passed for one, was nothing but a trail, probably made by the vehicles that had helped construct the missile silo back in the dark ages.

  “Hold up,” said Erikson as they crested a rise. “Four o’clock.”

  It was another Land Rover, the vehicle missing from the hangar, barely discernible in the twilight, the first glow of the morning sunlight on the distant horizon.

  Kane slowed and turned off the trail. “I don’t see them,” he said.

  “Be careful,” said Erikson. “Remember, they’ve no transmitters. We won’t see them. Keep your ears open.”

  Kane killed the engine. He turned on the spotlights on the roll bar to give them a better idea of what they were dealing with before they slid out of their own Land Rover and separated, moving in for a closer look.

  “What a mess,” Erikson called out.

  “I got three bodies over here,” said Kane.

  “Another two this side,” said Erikson.

  The desert floor around the seemingly abandoned vehicle was strewn with debris. It looked like a pack of rabid dogs had passed through.

  A camp table had been upended, the remnants of what appeared to have been an early breakfast beginning to rot in the dirt. Deckchairs had been tossed or kicked aside. A tent had been torn apart and its contents, including the sleeping bags within, had been pulled out into the open.

  Clothes belonging to the party carpeted the ground.

  Kane picked up a t-shirt and opened it out. It had a graphic of a face on it. Huge melon head. Small mouth and nostrils. Large, bulbous eyes.