by Mark Ayre
Cloak and Shield
Mark Ayre
The first six Adam and Eve thrillers are dedicated to my daughter, who turned one while I was writing them, and my wife, who did not.
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Contents
By Mark Ayre
Cloak and Shield
Grab Your Free Thriller Novel
Author’s Note
Have You Read?
The Adam and Eve Thrillers
The Hide and Seek Trilogy
The James Perry Mysteries
Standalone
About the Author
By Mark Ayre
The Adam and Eve Thrillers:
Fire and Smoke
Lost and Found
Cat and Mouse
Lock and Key
Cloak and Shield
Hope in Hell
The Adam and Eve boxset: All Six Thrillers
The Hide and Seek Trilogy
Hide and Seek
Count to Ten
Ready or Not (October 2020)
The James Perry Mysteries
The Black Sheep’s Shadow
All Your Secrets
Standalone
Poor Choices
Cloak and Shield
A guard brought Sandra two chairs. Alone, this would not have been enough to confirm Eve’s mother was not a prisoner. Far more conclusive was the deferential, fearful look the guard cast Sandra’s way before slinking from the room.
Sandra arranged the chairs, so they faced each other. Taking one, she crossed her legs and folded her hands into her lap.
“I imagine you have questions,” she said. Her voice was calm, measured. She did not smile, but a self-satisfied glimmer in her eye made Eve want to pummel the woman to death. Given Eve had thought her mother dead for over a decade, there would be no need to mourn again. If she had mourned the first time.
Sandra gestured to the free seat. “Please, sit. A padded chair has to be more comfortable than that awful bed.”
Eve looked at the chair as though it were a co-conspirator in the plot that had led to her and her brother’s capture. To punish it for its part, she kicked it aside. It hit the wall with a satisfying crash.
Sandra rolled her eyes. “You’re an adult. Stop acting like a toddler.”
“I’m fine to stand,” said Eve. Her legs were aching. Part of her regretted kicking the padded chair. She might have sat on the bed if that would not have shown weakness. “This shouldn’t take long.”
“Shouldn’t it?” Now Sandra did smile. “What if I told you I could answer all your questions, and that I will?”
“Then I would say,” Eve said without hesitating, “that answers from a liar are as valuable as an umbrella in a hurricane.”
Sandra chuckled. “Very visual. And of course, you have every reason to be sceptical. “You must feel as though you have suffered an awful betrayal.”
“That’s one of the side effects of being betrayed.”
“There you go again, acting like a child. Come now, sweetheart, take a seat, listen up. I’ll be honest. Go on, try me.”
Eve considered. Minutes ago, she had taken the pill a mysterious girl had slipped into her pocket. With the pill had been a note—two words: powers back. Upon arriving at the facility, Eve’s vile captors had pumped her full of drugs which suppressed her abilities. The pill was, she believed, a mind game devised by those same captors. Eve had taken it to prove no games could frighten her.
If it wasn’t a trick, when would her powers return?
Behind Sandra, the door was open. Through the hole, at least one guard, and likely more, stood watch. Had Eve her powers, in her current mood, an army would pose few problems.
She had only to buy some time, to play a game of wait and see.
Foolish though it was, she started to imagine the pill was no trick.
Still standing, she said to her mother, “After the organisation captured you, and faked your death. How long did it take them to turn you to their side? How long before you stopped being a prisoner and joined their team?”
“Good question,” said Sandra. “Unfortunately, its premise is flawed.”
“Sounds like an excuse.”
“No, no. Let me explain. I can’t give you a straight answer because the organisation never captured me. We simply made it look as though they had. So to answer your questions as best I can, you must first know they never turned me to their side. I never stopped being a prisoner because I wasn’t hauled in as a captive, rather brought home as a partner.”
Eve had never liked her mother. These claims still shocked the daughter to her core. She wavered, wobbled, and almost collapsed.
Smiling, Sandra said, “I told you I’d be honest.”
Adam was still coming to terms with his power’s new depths when he heard pounding feet coming his way. Discovering you could not turn invisible, that instead, you could control the senses of those around you, was a big deal. Learning via practical experiment that you could even control touch when it came to inanimate objects, and were thus able to walk through a locked door out of your cell, was almost too much to process. Adam needed time to sit and think. Such luxuries were rarely available to escaped prisoners. Adam was no exception.
Three guards appeared at one end of the hall—two more at the other.
To them, Adam turned invisible.
None of the guards believed this was a problem. The corridor was narrow, and they thought they could still hit Adam when he was invisible. They didn’t need to see him to down him in such close quarters.
The duo of guards stepped out of the corridor to give the trio a clear line of fire. These three emptied their clips and waited for the thud that would proceed by seconds Adam’s reappearance. Though they could not imagine they had missed, professionalism had them reload their guns and edge toward the door where Adam had so recently stood. Their focus was total. Thus, they missed the pop of the button on their central member’s holster. The man himself could not fail to notice when someone whipped his more lethal weapon from the holster. Panicked, he spun. Before he could complete his turn, there was a bullet in his skull.
The other two guards were turning. Adam dispensed three bullets and killed them both. Around the corner of the corridor, the duo of agents reappeared, guns raised. Disappearing as fast as they had appeared, Adam, now armed, stepped through the wall into his cell and dropped to the carpet, head pounding, vision swimming.
He had passed through the wall or door three times. The exertion was pushing him towards the brink of unconsciousness. Above him, concealed in the ceiling, the eyes of multiple cameras watched, relaying his position to a control room from which a man or woman could deploy an army of agents to deal with the rogue prisoner. Given the toll it took on his body, Adam would be unable to keep using his power as an evasion tactic.
Before they had lost her, Adam and Eve’s mother had taught them many skills. The twins were crack shots and skilled fighters. They were adept at evading capture and taking out large quantities of highly-trained, heavily armed enemies, even when no powers were involved. He needed every skill mum had taught him to escape his present situation.
Something else went in his favour. His enemies would expect him to try and save his sister and flee, or just to flee. He would not contemplate escaping without Eve. Before going to her, he would follow the trail upon which his dead girlfriend had set him. He needed to know if she were alive. This unexpected course offered a potential element of surprise which might work in his favour, if only for a little while.
Rising, though he was still panting, his heart still beating too fast, he turned to the wall. On the other side waited two enemies. Beyond them, potentially countless more, all of whom Adam might have to deal with before reaching his targets. Finding Saskia, freeing Eve, escaping.
He wasn’t ready but never would be.
With a final deep breath, he raised his gun and stepped through the wall.
“Given I named you Adam and Eve, I suppose I should talk about your genesis.”
For their entire childhood and most their teenage years, Sandra had bullied and belittled her children. Constantly informing them they could never be happy, would never lead normal lives, she had refused even to let them try. Instead, she had turned the twins into killing machines with all the skills necessary to evade the capture of the powerful organisation that pursued them. Having done so, she faked her death and joined Team Evil. For twelve years, Adam had mourned the loss of his mother. All that time, Sandra had worked against them. Now she sat opposite Eve, beaming as though this was a joyous reunion, making little jokes as though they were old friends.
“It goes back further than your births,” Sandra went on, oblivious to or uncaring of Eve’s cold stare. “But it does begin with boy and girl twins, not much younger than are you and Adam now. Down on their luck, they took a stroll through the barren countryside and stumbled upon something incredible. A tin shed in the middle of nowhere, and inside that shed, the twins—Joel and Julie—found something that would change their lives forever.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “This isn’t an audiobook. Get to the point.”
“I can’t help it,” said Sandra. “I’m theatrical by nature.”
Every inch of Eve was tense. Her skin was pale, but inside, the blood boiled, searching for a way to escape. It powered Eve’s hate glands, pushed her closer and closer to rising, grabbing the chair and using it to batter her mother to a pulp.
Somehow, she held her cool. For the time being, she let her mother narrate.
“Inside the shed were walls that glowed an unnatural red, for which the twins could find no source. Though they had little expertise between them, they knew they had stumbled upon something special. Julia says the glowing red walls spoke to her. You might think that sounds crazy. I’d advise you not to say so to her face. Joel doesn’t even remember that first trip.”
Sandra noticed a loose thread on her trousers. Plucked it and flicked it away. Eve saw the gun within her mother’s jacket and wondered what she would do if she could get hold of the weapon. Adam would never forgive his sister if she killed their mother. Forgetting him a second, could Eve bring herself to do it?
She didn’t think so. But if push came to shove…
“Through means both illegal and dangerous, they gathered a sum of money,” Sandra said. “Around the shed, they built a small complex and staffed it with bright but malleable minds. After discovering the room leaked a clean source of energy never before seen on Earth, they founded a company called J-Energy.”
Eve had heard of it, though she had never received an energy bill in her life. It was one of the biggest companies in the world. She yawned to show the formation of an energy company was not her idea of a riveting tale.
“Fine, fine, I’ll move over on. J-Energy made the twins billionaires. Over the last thirty years, they’ve founded thirteen companies, each of which you’d find on a list of the fifty wealthiest organisations in the world. But, why would you be interested in the formation of legitimate companies when I could talk about top-secret experiments?”
“Good question.”
“And you’ll get a good answer. You’ve always wondered from where your powers came. Were you born with them, or were they the gift of a strange experiment? The answer is both.”
Sandra’s smile grew as Eve struggled to withhold signs of interest. Eve despised the thought that she might care about what her mother had to say. But she had always wanted to learn her origin story. The answer came in an unappealing package, but she could not prevent herself from being interested in the content.
“Julie and Joel discovered early on that exposure to the red room was lethal. Thus, they fortified the walls and locked the room away at the facility’s centre. Eventually, they were even able to sink the room to what would become the third of four underground floors. From here, they were able to extract the energy without anyone entering, and no one did. Until Julia decided she wanted to lock a group of young women in the room to see what would happen. What drove her to this decision; no one knows.”
“She’s an arsehole?” Eve suggested.
Sandra waved this away. “Julia sought ten down-on-their-luck women from mid-teens to late twenties who would consent to sit in a room for a few minutes in return for £2,000. For desperate people, two grand is a fortune. They were not difficult to find. When they arrived, Julia oversaw the experiment herself.”
“Arsehole,” Eve repeated. Again, Sandra did not comment.
“The first group entered,” she said. “Within forty seconds, all ten had died. Joel and the facility’s limited staff assumed this failure would end the experiments. They were wrong. Julie brought in ten more girls, and ten more girls died. As did the next ten, and the next, and the next.”
Eve felt numb. It was clear her mother thought of the participants in these experiments as crops only. As if they were plants; meaningless. Their status lower than that of the typical lab rat. Eve, who had always considered herself cold, could not stop thinking of the fifty girls who had come here because they were desperate for cash. Who expected only to have to participate in a simple experiment and were probably excited to do so. Fifty girls slaughtered on the whim of a madwoman.
Eve hoped to one day meet Julia. There would be some conversation followed by many hours of excruciating torture.
“Crop six came around,” said Sandra. “By this point, Joel was starting to wonder about his sister. He made her promise trial six would be the last, though he struggled to believe she meant it. Luckily, there was no need to question the veracity of her claim. Ten girls entered the room that day, and thirty-six seconds later, nine were dead. The final girl, twenty years old, was alive, well, and pregnant.”
“What?”
Eve had been unable to stop herself. She cursed her show of eagerness and shock but could not remove those emotions from her face. Sandra gave a slow nod.
“Pregnant,” she repeated. “An immaculate conception, and not only that. Most people believe the red room is a link to another world or dimension. Possibly, the girl’s child would be half-human, half something else. The first in a new species. Does that not sound like the most astounding discovery of all time?”
All pretence was lost. Eve could not look away from her mother, nor feign disinterest in the story. Only dimly, a sense of dread began to creep in. A feeling that only grew as Sandra continued.
“The experiments got an official name. Operation Eden. Because everyone knew with exactly what they were dealing.”
“Eden…” Eve said, her mouth dry.
“You always believed you must be the latest in a long line of people with special abilities,” Sandra said. “But the truth is you are far more special than that. The first girl to survive the red room was me, Eve, and I did not choose your names on a whim or, as you often claimed, to piss you off.”
Sandra leaned forward, placing a hand on her daughter’s leg. Eve didn’t stop her.
“You are Adam and Eve,” Sandra said. “You are the first in a brand new and extraordinary race. And that, my daughter, is your destiny.”
The red glow became a red storm, through which Isla could see none of the girls with whom she had shared the room. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face, nor the clothes on her body.
There was agony, as the red seeped into every pore and burned her from the inside out it seemed she could not last seconds in such pain, yet some force held her far longer. Throughout, her mouth gaped, promising a scream her vocal cords seemed unable or unw
illing to fulfil.
Then it was over. The red storm dissipated. Isla collapsed in a room that looked as it had when she first entered. A metal box, rounded with walls that glowed red. There was not a blemish in sight except a single crack, a couple of inches high, less than a millimetre wide, halfway up the wall which faced the door. It was this crack that had worried Karim; had led to him asking Isla to research the potential danger of the room as the energy levels it output continued to spike. It was because of the crack she was in here now.
The other nine girls were gone. Dr Abbot had not opened the door while Isla tried to scream and snuck them out for a laugh. The red room had incinerated them. Only Isla remained.
Less than one per cent of the woman who entered the room survived. How had Isla become one? What made her different? She strained her memory. As she burned, she was sure something had happened. She caught glimpses of a black void and a balcony overlooking a hellish landscape, but to these places, she had never been. She would remember, wouldn’t she? She could recall nothing beyond trying to scream in the red storm. Before that, Steadman shooting Karim for trying to save the world and punishing Isla, Karim’s accomplice, with the red room.
A creaking and electronic hum signalled that huge door which enclosed her was opening. Abbot and Steadman appeared; smiles gleaming.
“I’m so glad you survived,” Steadman lied. “I suspected you would,” he lied again.
Isla wanted to rise, to attack, to claw out their eyes and rip free their throats but hadn’t the strength to stand. Worse, she felt sick, and her stomach seemed to be moving.
Abbot was staring. “It’s never worked so quickly,” he whispered. Isla didn’t understand the comment.