The Blueprint (The Upgrade Book 1)

by Wesley Cross

  “No surprise there. In that case I’m going to finish my drink and head out. I’ll let you know if I dig something up in the next couple of days. Oh, and I’ll take that cabbie’s number as well.”

  Max finished his drink and started putting on his coat. “You two please be careful.” He kissed Rachel goodbye and, turning to shake Jason’s hand, positioned himself so she couldn’t see his face. We gotta talk, he mouthed to Jason.

  As he exited the building and turned left, he walked by a maintenance van with tinted windows parked on the side of the street. Max stopped for a few seconds just few feet away, looking at it while buttoning his coat and fixing his scarf. After a moment he approached the van and knocked on the window. Nothing happened and after standing there for another moment Max continued to walk.

  CHAPTER 4

  Although his rugged face with a two-day stubble and piercing gray eyes betrayed no emotion, Jeremy was worried. Standing with his arms behind his back, he silently watched his boss, a short bald man, pacing the office back and forth spitting profanities and threats.

  Unfortunately, his boss had every right to be furious. Jeremy knew that he had completely blown a simple operation. Yes, it felt as a series of unfortunate events that made his simple and seemingly foolproof plan fall apart, but he knew better than to try to make any excuses. It’s one thing to screw up an operation but it’s quite another not to take responsibility for it. In his line of work he could get himself killed for less than that. He couldn’t help, however, but to think how improbable it was for so many things to go wrong in such a short time.

  The plan was simple, a sniper was supposed to take a position one hour prior to the target’s arrival at their destination. There would have been a single shot, a well-rehearsed escape, and it would have been done and done. Jeremy wouldn’t even have to be anywhere close to the action himself.

  Things started to go wrong right from the start. First, the sniper failed to establish a contact when he was supposed to take the position. In fact, the sniper didn’t make any contact at all, as on his way to the location he got run over by a ninety-year-old grandma, who crushed both of his legs. Now he was in a medically-induced coma and handcuffed to his bed. Things like high-powered rifles packed in a case along with a suppressor that the old lady was nice enough to drive to the hospital with him were still disturbing enough for the police to get involved.

  Despite the initial setback, Jeremy was confident he could finish the mission. Like a true professional, he had a backup plan. He and his second in command were positioned in an SUV and were monitoring the signal of the target’s cell phone that allowed them to follow their car at a safe distance. Once it became clear that the sniper wasn’t going to be in place, Jeremy sprang to action. His lieutenant quickly gained on the target’s vehicle, and Sykes lowered his window, stuck out his automatic rifle, and took a careful aim at the silhouette in the back of the limo.

  Just as he pressed the trigger, the front tire blew out.

  The SUV madly swerved right, then immediately left as his driver was trying to regain control, and Jeremy’s initial salvo went completely off target, hitting the town car at the corner of the trunk. Despite his quick reaction, it took a couple of seconds to get the limo in his crosshairs again, but the passengers were no longer visible. They must have realized what was happening and ducked for cover. Frustrated Sykes let out a long torrent of bullets hoping that something would get through. His driver finally got the car under control and they tried to ram the limo town car off the road but it was all in vain.

  His lieutenant accelerated hard, trying to give Jeremy an unobscured shot. That’s when the limo’s driver slammed on the brakes, making them overshoot the target and in one fluid motion executed a flawless PIT maneuver, pushing them off the highway. Jeremy had just enough time to pull himself inside the SUV and slap a belt in place before they crashed through the railing and went airborne. He got lucky. Except for few bruises on his legs and torso he was completely fine.

  The driver, who wasn’t buckled in, wasn’t that fortunate. On impact he went straight through the windshield, severing his carotid artery in the process. He was dead within seconds.

  “We can stage another operation, boss,” he heard himself saying. “Nobody is going to be able to link the incident on the bridge to the hit.”

  “No, it’s way too hot right now.” His boss finally stopped pacing and sat behind his desk. “Get out.”

  Sykes wasn’t surprised by that decision. Even in this day and age when the police typically didn’t get involved in mini wars between different corporations he knew it would be foolish for them to push their luck. If there were an actual response, it would be swift and deadly and Jeremy wouldn’t want to be there if that happened.

  He was forty-two, which meant that he belonged to the generation they called these days “The Disconnects.” He got a glimpse of normal life as he was growing up, then the world became progressively divided and by the time he was eighteen there weren’t that many options for a son of a hotel concierge and stay-at-home mom.

  He enlisted in the NAVY with hopes of staying just long enough that it would pay for his college but then, unexpectedly for himself, he liked it. The camaraderie, the travel, the adrenaline of combat missions appealed to his adventurous side. He also discovered that he was good at it. In fact, he was better than the vast majority of his peers. He applied to join the Navy SEALS, was accepted, and graduated on top of his class and joined one of the Teams. He loved the work, but as the time went on and Sykes got older he knew he needed a way out.

  Joining the private sector was easy and surprisingly lucrative. People of his skill were hard to find. The job was just as dangerous as his old gig, sometimes even more so, as he had to deal with the corporate rivals who, unlike ragtag terrorists were equipped with the latest weapons and technology, then there was the obvious requirement to keep things on the quiet side. Jeremy couldn’t just hit a high profile businessman or a political advisor with a hand grenade, not that sometimes it didn’t come to that. His job was to make hits look like personal vendettas, random gang drive-bys, or better yet a complete accident if at all possible.

  He took the elevator down to the street level and walked to his car flanked by two bodyguards. Jeremy took the driver seat with one guard in the passenger seat and the other in the back of his car. The day was over, but his job wasn’t. He needed to know every step of today’s operation. Luck sometimes played a part in any military strategy, but Sykes wanted to make sure that was all it was. He reached for his cell phone and dialed the towing compound, where his totaled car was taken.

  “Jimmy,” he said, when the line opened, “you got anything yet?”

  “No sir,” the man on the other end answered. “They just brought it in. Didn’t have a chance to take a look at it yet.”

  “I want you to check everything. If there’s anything that doesn’t look kosher I want you to text me right away.”

  Jeremy hung up the phone and started the engine. He sat motionlessly for a few moments before putting his car into gear. Something was amiss and he was too experienced to ignore it.

  “Everything okay, boss?” asked the guard sitting next to him.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “but keep your eyes open.”

  “We always do,” replied the man without a smile.

  To a certain extent he knew what bothered him. On the one hand, the never-ending conflict between GA and Guardian had been intensifying over the past few years. Some warehouse buildings were blown; a few unimportant people had been killed. On the other hand it felt artificial. Too much of a tit for tat. No crucial information stolen nor gained, at least he wasn’t aware of any and his clearance was high. The police stopped getting involved at all and that bothered Jeremy more than anything else. The cops were no longer the absolute power that ruled the streets with an iron fist, but Sykes struggled to find an explanation for this total lack of involvement. His phone rang.

  “Yeah?�
��

  “It’s Jimmy,” the man said, “I haven’t really had a chance to dig in but this doesn’t look right.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The tire that blew out looks funny to me,” Jimmy said. “Like I said I can’t prove anything yet, but if I were you I’d watch out. My guess is that somebody fucked with your wheels.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy,” he said. “Text me when you have more.

  He put his foot to the floor listening to the comforting roar of the turbo engine. The silver Mercedes shot down the street passing other cars as if they were standing still. Driving at high speeds usually had a calming effect on Jeremy, but today it wasn’t working. The muscles in his shoulders tensed as he gripped the wheel.

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  CHAPTER 5

  At quarter to eight on Monday morning, the company car dropped Rachel off next to a windowless nine-story building on Flushing Avenue in the industrial part of Brooklyn, not too far from Brooklyn Shipyard. The huge sign on the weatherworn red brick building said A to Z self-storage for less. The driver, a grim looking middle-aged man, gave her security code to the simple looking keypad on the gate, and drove off without saying another word.

  Confused and wondering if she was in the right place she dialed the nine digit code, and after a few seconds the gate buzzed and let her into the parking lot in front of the building. A handful of cars were parked by the farthest wall. Rachel looked around and spotted a small narrow door under a squat awning at the end of the parking lot. The door was odd. There was no handle or a knob and as far as she can tell there was no bell that she could ring. Next to the door was an old fallout shelter sign. She knocked on the door and waited for a few seconds, but nothing happened.

  “What the hell,” she said out loud, looking around for help, but the parking lot was empty and silent. She banged on the door a bit louder and, when no answer came, in frustration she hit the fallout shelter sign.

  Unexpectedly it clicked and opened like a miniature door, exposing a smooth surface of a biometric scanner. A stylized picture of a hand appeared on the screen. Rachel placed her right hand on the scanner, and a second later it beeped. She half expected to see “access granted” to appear on the screen, but instead the scanner spat out an ominous red “unauthorized”, then shut itself down. Before she was able to start panicking again, an invisible speakerphone came to life and a friendly female voice called out from what sounded like a conference room.

  “Hi there! You must be Rachel Hunt. We’ve been expecting you. Mr. Steven Poznyak, your lab director, will be meeting you shortly. You’ve been given a temporary access to the facility until you get proper credentials. Please, proceed to the elevator bank B and head down to the seventeenth floor. He’ll see you there in five.” The intercom went silent, and the door without the knob noiselessly slid up, opening an unexpectedly bright hallway that smelled like a hospital.

  “Seventeenth floor huh,” Rachel muttered to herself, wondering if she misheard as she walked to the elevator. To her dismay, the buttons on the inside wall of the elevator read from ten to twenty, but confusion was quickly replaced by a sense of wonder when she realized that she was going down and not up.

  The seventeenth sublevel opened into a huge hangar-like room that seemed to go on forever. As far as Rachel could see, the floor was littered with aluminum tables surrounded by people in white overalls who seemed hard at work. Above the ground was a maze of an overhead rail system with robotic manipulators hanging down and moving some of the heavier objects from one table to the next. She stood there for a few seconds taking it all in.

  “Miss Hunt,” a pleasant voice called, and she saw a short chubby man in his early forties briskly walking toward her. “Steven Poznyak. You can call me Steve.” His lab coat was a wrinkled mess, handshake was strong, and his gray eyes behind powerful glasses were lit with humor and intelligence. She liked him immediately.

  “Follow me, please. You are going to have to forgive us for the fallout shelter sign theatrics. Someone should have told you how to use it,” he said navigating the lab and leading her on. “Unfortunately with clients like the Department of Defense and Otomo Corporation, secrecy is of paramount importance. Ah, here we are.”

  He led her to a big office with glass walls built on a platform few feet above the ground. It gave it a commanding view of the entire floor.

  “They call it a fish bowl around here. I guess it fits. Please sit down.”

  “This is an impressive facility.” Rachel sat in an uncomfortable looking aluminum chair.

  “Thank you Rachel. May I call you Rachel? Let me give you a quick overview of what to expect.” Poznyak made himself comfortable behind a massive chrome colored desk.

  “First, let’s talk secrecy. I know you signed all the required disclosures, but I want to drive this point home. Asclepius is built on secrecy, thrives on secrecy, and will maintain secrecy at all costs. I don’t want to sound ominous, but if you betray the company’s trust, I can promise you that you’ll never work in your field ever again. Not to mention that you’ll probably go to jail for a long time.”

  “I understand.”

  “That means,” he continued, “that you can’t discuss things that you do here with anybody, and I mean anybody. If you think you can’t handle a lifestyle where you can’t share your day’s highs and lows with your husband when you get home after a sixteen-hour shift, right now would be a good time to say that.”

  “I can handle confidentiality and I’m excited to be here.”

  “Great. I hate the secrecy myself but it’s a part of our life here. But let’s talk about the good stuff.” Lab director put his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers.

  “The vast majority of what we’re working on here has military applications. Exoskeletons, wet-wired triggers, body armor implants, and so on. But don’t let it make you feel like a warmonger. A lot of big inventions developed for the military ended up helping humanity in more ways than their creators could ever imagine. Take nuclear fission for example. And in this day and age when, let’s be frank here, big corporations are more like independent states, security and weaponry are taken very seriously. So, until we have the luxury of building what we want for the purposes that we desire, we need to be able to pay our bills.

  “Speaking of bills…“ He paused and poured himself a glass of water. “Would you like some?”

  “I’m okay, thank you.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice. We’re what some people call it an off brand company. That means that, although the majority of our contracts come from independent sources such as DOD and Otomo, at the end of the day we get those contracts because Guardian Manufacturing allows us to. Without Mr. Engel’s blessing we’d be out of business in about three months’ time.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good. Now here’s what you’ll be working on.” Steve slid a thick binder across his desk. It had a stamp Level 17 across the top and in the middle in small block letters it said AL-3.1.

  “AL stands for Artificial Lungs, and it’s one of our most advanced projects. This is what some people consider revolutionary, while others, of course, might call dangerous or even blasphemous, a true human augmentation.

  “These lung implants would enable their user to extract oxygen from pollution heavy air and possibly even water. As, I’m sure you can imagine, that could be handy in combat situations. Under certain circumstances, the implants could actually substitute the organ itself. Initial experiments and animal trials looked promising and I think your addition to our team would help me perfect the prototype. If everything goes right, we should be able to start human trials in about six months.”

  The rest of the day was a whirlwind of paperwork, biometric scans and catching up on her team’s research.

  Rachel’s team consisted of six scientists and their main and only priority was project AL-3.1. As the name suggested, it was a third incarnation of the device and so far the most pr
omising. They had been working on this model for almost a year and, as her new boss pointed out, were inching ever closer to human trials. Their progress has been meticulously documented, and the first thing Rachel would have to do was familiarize herself with the work that had been done and the problems that still lay ahead.

  At eight in the evening Rachel felt that her brain was refusing to take in any more new information. She felt exhausted. She called for the company car, and allowed herself to sink back into the soft leather of the back seat and relax. The driver, the same cheerless man who picked her up in the morning, was quiet and, as she was sitting in a barely moving traffic, Rachel found herself thinking about what her husband said back at the restaurant in Fort Lauderdale few days ago.

  Jason, of course, was right. Life did change for the worse in the last few years. They were still kids when the process had begun. Slow at first, as the world recovered after the biggest economic contraction since the Great Depression. For some time the life even seemed to get better, but those who paid attention knew better.

  The signs were there. There would be an article, written by a renowned venture capitalist, which would call the existence of middle class a “post world war two fluke.” There would be a study, completed by an economics professor, calling the ever-widening social gap “the biggest problem of this century.” Before long, she didn’t need to read a fancy paper to know the world was going to a dark place; all she needed to do was to look outside of her window. She was lucky, that she still had a window to look out of.

  A serious fit of cough interrupted Rachel’s thoughts.

  “Are you okay, miss?” The cheerless driver looked back but no real concern registered in his voice.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” That came out hoarsely. Her chest felt heavy, and there was a dull ache that somehow radiated through her shoulders. She clearly wasn’t taking the change in climate very well, but as far as she was concerned it was a small price to pay for the opportunity she got. Rachel took a few deep breaths and the pain finally seemed to go away. She made a mental note to make an appointment for a check-up. The last thing she needed right now was to go down with pneumonia.