“This is for the best, Ben. Powell. Crane. This one. They’re all part of it. We need to make it all go away.”
“No, this isn’t what I want,” said Ben.
“It isn’t about what you want, Ben. It’s about what needs to happen to make things right.”
“But…” How could she do to Naul what she did to Cole, when the soldier had none of her nanotech in his body?
Ben’s eyes moved to the blue liquid in the IV Sophia had hooked up to Naul. There was more than just saline in the solution.
The soldier convulsed, the thick plastic ties cutting into his wrists and ankles the only thing stopping him from thrashing right off the table. After reaching some pinnacle of agony, he recoiled, curling up as much as he could with his limbs pinned down. His whole body shivered uncontrollably for a few seconds before stopping.
The thin blue lines illustrated by the dye in Naul’s blood appeared to blur as his arteries and veins broke down. In less than a minute there was nothing on the surface of the trolley but a mud-colored, viscous liquid.
Ben looked at Erikson. The mercenary hadn’t moved. So much for the loyalty he should have felt towards his former brethren.
Erikson returned Ben’s stare coolly and shrugged. What could he have done? Sophia would have just done the same to him.
Suddenly, Erikson’s eyes widened, almost bulging right out of his head. He clawed at his neck, struggling to breathe, and then reached one of his hands behind his head, scrabbling for something he could not reach.
Ben checked Sophia. Her hands were by her sides, the expression on her face one that was none the wiser. Whatever was happening to the mercenary, it was apparently not down to her.
Erikson stopped struggling and his eyes closed, his head lolling to one side. Whatever force was holding him up let him drop to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
If there was an invisible in the room, it was unlike one Ben had ever encountered. He thought he might have sensed the presence. But there was nothing.
He stood his ground.
Erikson had collapsed right at his feet. The mercenary wasn’t dead. He was still breathing. But he wasn’t getting up any time soon.
Sophia moved around to the opposite side of the trolley, putting it between her and Ben.
The soldiers had been referred to as ghosts. But whatever force was in the room with them, Ben was not scared by it. He was ready to face it, if it was ready to reveal itself to him.
He took the middle of the floor.
“Who are you?” he asked.
He glanced over at Sophia and saw fear in her eyes. The hold she had over Cole, Kane and Erikson was useless here.
The air was still.
No movement.
Ben couldn’t detect anything.
He was beginning to think maybe Erikson had some kind of seizure when a muscular invisible arm coiled around his neck and dragged him backwards like a ragdoll. The soles of his bare feet scrambled for purchase on the cold vinyl floor, as he was hauled right out of the room and up the sloped corridor towards the central hub.
Ben’s assailant had taken the liberty of laying something across the sill of the huge vault door to prevent it from closing and slowing down his exit: Kane’s body. This was as far as he had gotten after Sophia dispatched him back to the truck stop. He was out cold, the same way as Erikson. Kane’s leaving when he did had presented the intruder with the perfect opportunity to get around the retina scan. He held Ben fast with one hand and hoisted Kane’s form out of the entrance, hefting the large metal door shut again behind them.
40
Sophia heard the vault door at the top of the corridor slam shut.
But there was no telling if they had shut it behind them on the way out or in, or how many of them were in here with her.
She stood and listened.
All she could hear was the hum of the computers and the wheeze of Erikson’s stilted breathing. She turned her head slightly, her eyes tracking and panning around the room trying to seek out any visual anomaly.
She grabbed the stand the nanotech-infused saline bag was suspended from, and hauled it over the trolley toward her, tearing the bag off the hanger and brandishing it like a bat.
She moved around the trolley and swung the pole in a swathing arc, hoping that she would find no one in its path, and that if she did, it would hit them hard enough to inflict damage. She moved out into the middle of the floor, swiping through the air around her, stepping over Erikson and finding nothing.
If there was someone in there with her, they could be biding their time, waiting until she ran out of steam, hiding in a corner or even low to the ground.
Before she was ready to let her guard down she would test each and every one of those possibilities.
***
The pressure around Ben’s neck vanished. “Come on,” a voice said, a strong, firm hand grabbing him by the wrist. “We have to move fast.”
The way in which Ben was held told him exactly where his assailant was. And the direction the words came from gave him a good idea where the man’s throat would be.
Ben twisted the man’s wrist sharply, in the way he had been taught, breaking the weakest link in the chain between thumb and forefinger, wrenching that arm free while he used the other to deliver an axe chop to the windpipe.
He caught the man’s choked cry of discomfort and visualized a pair of invisible hands clutching protectively at an invisible neck. The attacker let out a series of coughs, each one getting louder as he advanced in Ben’s direction.
If this was one of the ghosts that Kane and Erikson had missed – a man trained to fight - then Ben could not afford to give him an inch.
He still had an edge in that he was up against an opponent without the lifetime of experience he had in the unseen world. It could only have been pure luck that the ghost managed to locate and grab a hold of Ben, given this one had none of the nanotech inside him or, it followed, any of the optical enhancements.
Ben crouched, diverting all his energy into his legs, poised to spring like a jack in the box and knock the wind, and hopefully the consciousness, out of his foe. But as he launched, the ghost sidestepped and Ben shot right past, landing flat on his face, hard. His vision blurred with the impact, and he tried to shake himself back to his senses.
“Nice try,” the voice said, scooping him to his feet with one hand hooked underneath each of his arms, dragging him faster than he could move out of the central hub, not into the elevator and back to the surface, but down one of the corridors, deeper into the bowels of the underground complex.
***
Sophia dropped the IV stand to the floor, satisfied she was alone. Sweat rolled over her brow and she wiped it away, venturing over to the console, expecting to find that Ben and his abductor had already made it to the surface. But the elevator had not gone anywhere. Which meant one or both of two things. One: the invisible holding Ben really wasn’t a ghost Kane and Erikson had missed, and therefore didn’t possess the means to get out of the complex. Two: the invisible had something special in mind for Ben before trying to make good his escape.
Unless that was killing the boy before killing himself, that could not be allowed to happen.
Project Clear and everyone associated with or resulting from it were going to disappear, once and for all, forever, in this place, today.
***
“Where are you taking me?” said Ben.
“Out of here,” the voice answered. “But we have to do something first. I need to get you to the infirmary.”
“But there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Glad to hear it,” the voice said as they slammed through a pair of doors, “but there will be very soon if we don’t move.”
There was a familiarity about the voice. A little rougher around the edges, and older than he remembered. “Jason?”
“Hell of a reunion, huh?” he said.
“But Sophia said-”
“I can only i
magine what Sophia said. Whatever it was, you can be sure it was crap.”
They reached the infirmary and Ben took in his former mentor’s appearance, or lack of one. “You took that compound,” Ben said. “You’ll have to be careful, it…”
Jason cut him off. “We’ll get to that later. Where’s Cole?”
“Cole? He’s dead.”
“That so? Sophia shut the transmitters inside you down?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then right now my guess is she’s rebooting them.”
In the middle of the room stood a huge MRI machine. Jason took a remote control handset from the table next to it.
“Not only will she be able to pinpoint your location when they’re back online, she’ll be able to kill you, exactly the same way she did Naul.”
“You were in the room for that?”
“I was in the room for it all.”
“But… why? Why would she kill me now?”
“It doesn’t matter why, Ben. All that matters is stopping it from happening.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to,” said Jason, as good as herding Ben on to the bench of the MRI machine. “The magnetic field generated by this thing will disrupt the signal from the nanotransmitters and knock them out. Let’s just hope the machine’s ready to go before they are.”
Ben submitted and lay down on the bench. All around him the humming sound from the huge, claustrophobia-inducing machine intensified.
***
“Damn it,” Sophia said. “Where are you?”
Cole had been cocksure enough to not secure any of the internal systems, so pulling up a schematic of the repurposed silo had been a cinch. Marrying it up to the GPS tracking system she employed for the nanotransmitters didn’t take much longer. But she wasn’t picking up anything.
The progress bar on the screen of her wrist tablet was three quarters of the way along. The length of time the nanotech had taken to boot up before had never been an issue. Ordinarily Sophia wouldn’t have been concerned, but there was something about the way in which Ben had been snatched that had her on edge. Something purposeful.
The progress bar turned from blue to red. The nanotransmitters were live again. Ben’s location underground was revealed eventually, but nothing more. Less than five per cent of the tech had rebooted, damaged somehow all of a sudden. She tapped out the initiate destruct sequence command, hoping that what was left would be enough to get the job done, but guessing that she was going to need to get her hands dirty to make sure.
***
The intimidating hum generated by the MRI machine was joined by a menacing, repetitive thump.
“Feel anything?” Jason shouted over the din.
“Just uncomfortable.”
“We can live with that. The machine was preset for a full body scan. I’m going to run it again. No harm in giving those microscopic bastards a second dose, just to make sure.”
***
Sophia kicked at Erikson’s unconscious form. There was no response, and no time to wait around while he came to. She relieved him of his submachine gun and pressed its stock into her shoulder, fixing Ben’s location, the infirmary the schematic had informed her, in her mind. She prowled out of the room, advancing into the corridor, listening carefully.
To knock out the nanotech in Ben’s bloodstream the way it had been would have needed an EMP. And the second best thing to an electromagnetic pulse was the powerful magnetic field of an MRI scanner.
Ben didn’t come up with that on his own.
It was clear now that the adversary she was dealing with was not one of Cole’s ghosts, but an apparition of a different form altogether.
The ghost of Christmas past.
Jason.
Pushing through the vault door and into the central hub, she started down the hall toward the medical wing.
Sophia found it hard to believe that Jason would have shot himself up with an even more potent version of Cole’s formula, but there was no other way to explain what he had managed to do here.
She had always marveled at how Ben was able to “see” Eve. It was much more than a bond between mother and son. It was a natural ability that existed within the boy. Yet on this occasion, that ability had failed. Anyone would have thought Jason was better at being invisible than the only genuine invisible in existence.
When it came down to it, Jason’s guardian complex where Ben was concerned was almost paternal.
Right there, in the blackness of that subterranean hallway, the impenetrable cloud shading Sophia’s thoughts broke and the sun came out, almost blinding her.
It was too far-fetched to even remotely believe, but the conclusion she had just arrived at made a whole lot of sense of the story so far, so ridiculously simple, outlandish, and now obvious as it seemed.
***
Powell eased Ben up into a sitting position on the bench of the MRI machine. “You okay?” he asked.
Ben stretched his limbs. “I’m good, but I’m not sure for how much longer” he said, his eyes focused over Powell’s shoulder.
“Hello, Jason,” said Sophia. “Please stay right where you are.” She was standing in the doorway with a submachine gun trained in their direction. The MRI remote still in Jason’s hand told her where he was. The dent in the cushion on the bench gave away Ben’s position.
“I’ve got to hand it to you,” she said to him. “You had me completely fooled.”
“Me too,” said a voice behind her.
Sophia got pushed into the room, lowering her weapon as Crane drove her along, a weapon of his own, a large silver revolver, pressed to the back of her head.
“I thought I might find you here, Powell,” said Crane. “After what you told me about the little stunt Cole’s man was trying to pull with the MRI? I see it works.”
He drew back the pistol like a hammer and walloped Sophia across the head. She crumpled to the ground, out cold, and he retrieved her gun.
Crane smiled up at them. “She was right. You did have us all fooled.”
He produced a much more slimline pistol with a long, narrow barrel, immediately firing two silent rounds, one each, into Ben and Powell.
Ben looked down and saw a plastic syringe with a feather tailpiece protruding from his shoulder. He instinctively plucked it out, as did Jason.
“I like to be able to see who I’m talking to,” said Crane.
Ben recalled the pictures he had seen at Cole’s base of operations. Crane had been in a couple of them. Back then he had a little more hair, a lot of it darker than it was now.
What he remembered most were the glasses. Big thick-rimmed, military-looking affairs that looked more like goggles than spectacles. The kind only a person with truly dire eyesight would require. The colonel wasn’t wearing them now.
“Ah, there you both are. Much better,” said Crane.
It was more than simply corrective surgery. Crane must have been fitted with the same optical receivers Cole and company had been using.
He looked directly at Ben as he waggled a finger at Jason. “Powell was one of… no… was the most skilled infiltration operatives I ever had. He got into places and situations he had no right to. Brought us back stuff we wouldn’t have dared dream of getting our hands on.
“Would duck behind enemy lines like he was nipping next door for a cup of sugar. Could do on his own in one night what it took a team of five men a month to plan and execute.” Crane’s eyes narrowed. “It never even crossed my mind when the first invisible was discovered, that could have been your secret.”
There was a moment of realization in the colonel’s eyes as something came to him. “Now I understand. The shoulder.” He looked at Ben again, talking in the tone old friends might use to regale each other with stories from the old days.
Except that his was riddled with venom.
“He was retired from the field after sustaining injuries on an incursion into Berlin, in the eighties, back when things were
still interesting.
“It was a little puzzling. The injuries in themselves weren’t serious. The main one was a gunshot wound to his upper arm. The bullet broke up and dispersed itself throughout the bone. Common enough occurrence. Hundreds of soldiers are walking around with bullet fragments in their bodies. Removing the slug causes far more damage than leaving it in. But Powell was adamant. He wanted it out. Was told it would weaken the bone and, as a result, he would have to have a titanium plate fitted. Guess what? He refused that too. No questions.”
Crane shook his head.
“Except from me. My best man was committing career suicide right in front of me. Why would someone - someone as gifted as Powell was - do a thing like that?”
“Because how could be invisible with a metal plate in his arm,” said Ben.
“This was all a long time before the first invisible was discovered,” said Crane, smiling a smug grin of satisfaction. “If I were to shoot you, Powell, I have a feeling I wouldn’t find any of Cole’s magic potion in you.”
“Of course you would,” said Ben. “How could you not? He’d have to be an invisible himself otherwise. One just like me.”
Powell’s invisible form gave way and he materialized, like a character from an old episode of Star Trek beaming in.
“And we can’t just do that either,” said Ben.
“I’m afraid that’s not exactly correct,” said Powell. “We can switch between states. You just don’t know how to do it yet, Ben, that’s all.”
Crane laughed like he had just won the lottery. “Right under my nose this whole time.” He strode excitedly into the middle of the room. “All the time we spent trying to create the ultimate stealth soldier, and I already had one. Ben, what did Cole tell you about where your mother was found?”
“That it was in a burning apartment building. In Seattle.”
“Seattle,” Crane sang to himself. “Where was your home town again, Powell?”
Jason didn’t answer.
There was a stirring on the floor. Sophia sat up, rubbing the back of her head.
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