Jack Be Nimble: A Lion About to Roar Book 4

by Ben English

  Same drill as before. Take the keycards, and ammo, anything useful. Since they already had guns, Jack disassembled the pistols and threw the pieces into different trash cans. Neither man carried a radio.

  Most of the children had approached the glass barrier. The violence had likely finished too quickly for them to notice. One boy—almost a man, Jack placed him at about twelve—looked disappointed.

  Mercedes was talking to them by the time Jack finished shackling the second guard with his own tiny handcuffs. Neither of the men wore insignia, but Jack noticed their uniforms were a cut above the others. He supposed this indicated some sort of rank.

  “These were all kids from the plane, Jack. They said the guards took their parents away after the plane landed. All of their parents got a second round of injections, but the kids haven’t had any.”

  One of the little girls pushed a rolled-up paper through a hole. It was a drawing of a giant pink rabbit with his arm around a woman. It read, in crayon, “Feel better Mommy I love you more than pretty bunnies.”

  “Can you give that to my mother?” asked the girl. “She was sick on the plane.” She obviously recognized Mercedes. And to his surprise, she seemed to recognized him as well.

  “Are you Jack?” asked the little girl.

  He found a finger-sized hole in the glass, and used it. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She shook his finger. To Mercedes, she said, “I’m glad you found your friend.”

  The second guard laughed wetly.

  Digging his heels into the rubber floor, he pushed himself more or less into a sitting position, grimacing when he moved. He hitched himself slowly upright. “Enjoy them while you can,” he said. “Any minute now, they’ll be gone.” He watched the children as he spoke. “Any minute.”

  Mercedes still had her baton, and stood near enough to use it. “What are you talking about?”

  “We came down here to see it, see the last of them.” The guard’s eyes swept to Mercedes, measured her weapon, and returned quickly to the children. “Everybody knows the signal’s gone out. It’s just a matter of time.”

  There was something else here. Jack sensed a second presence in the room, a flicker of something more than a hired security man following instructions. The guard stared at the children hungrily, almost desperately, reluctant to blink or breathe or do anything that might distract him.

  There was nothing sexual in the gaze. He looked at their hair, their mouths, their eyes, lingered on their eyes. Almost as if he couldn’t decide what part of them he found more thrilling.

  The children stood together, but a few of them shifted to stand behind Jack.

  Mercedes leaned closer. “What are you—”

  The guard’s feet exploded, scissoring against Mercedes’ankle and knees. She fell, and with sudden strength he jammed his shoulders against the furniture behind him, lifting the chair leg high enough to slip the handcuffs out. Before Jack could maneuver over a supine Mercedes, the man was on his feet. “You don’t really think, in Mr. Raines’ beautiful new world, that there would be room for anything as imperfect as these things, do you?”

  His face reddened, and the handcuffs snapped. “Room for anything so unformed.” He spat the words.

  Jack remembered he had a gun, but before he could bring it to bear the man charged, leaping over Mercedes and bearing down on him.

  Wall behind you.

  I know! Can’t maneuver, she might be hurt—

  Wall behind you, Jack.

  Ah, right. Instinct and training took the reins, and Jack stepped forward into the guard’s bull rush. Planted his own feet sideways, swept his thigh into the other man’s legs, just a touch lower than his center of gravity. Duck under the arms as the torso sails past, strike hard at the same time into the solar plexus and against the nape of the neck.

  The big man somersaulted into the glass, striking it upside down. The entire wall shuddered, and the guard crumpled to a heap on the floor. Not nearly as tidy as the stack of drawings on the other side. Jack hoped he fell on his head.

  The children were speechless, with the exception of the twelve year-old. “Awesome!”

  Mercedes was okay. Made a rueful face as she rubbed her backside. “I should have seen that coming.”

  “Easy mistake. You stood too close.”

  The other guard sat watching them with wide, wide eyes.

  “Mercedes, can you talk to the kids for a few minutes?” Jack hadn’t broken a sweat, and he used that to his advantage. Pitching his voice to carry just as far as necessary, he crouched carefully near the guard. “All right. You were here with your buddy, waiting and watching for something to happen with the children. What is it?”

  The man stared back.

  “Did you put explosive material in their clothing? Is there a bomb somewhere in that room? Strychnine in the popcorn, what?”

  Got a head shake in return, but the man’s eyes never left his.

  Jack did not blink. Old actor’s trick. Get in front of the camera and don’t blink when rolling. Brings all kind of intensity to the scene. When Jack prepared himself beforehand he could go quite a long time without needing to blink, and if someone dared to pay him the full measure of their attention, they really didn’t know what they were in for.

  Under this kind of scrutiny, the man didn’t look like much of a guard. Clean shaven, very expensive aftershave. Not soft, but not muscled in the right places either.

  Jack smiled. “You’re going to tell me,” he said, and tapped the other man’s shoulder, lightly. “You’re going to feel much better when you do.” Their eyes remained locked. “You’re not a bad man. Just got caught up in all this.”

  He thought of something Mercedes mentioned. “Why haven’t the children received their injections yet?”

  The guard blinked, confused, and in that moment Jack lightly pressed the bones of his broken wrist together.

  When the screams died down due to lack of breath, Jack relented. The man broke quickly. He wasn’t technically a member of the security staff, more like an advanced medical assistant trained to shoot a gun. They kept him paired with the other man, a more experienced guard, but really his job was to observe the children, record anything unexpected as they reacted to the signal.

  “But these kids weren’t injected on the plane,” said Mercedes. “Did you do that after you brought them here?”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t need injections. Their parents—their parents took care of that for us.”

  None of the children had returned to their toys.

  “We supply all the big pharmaceuticals with microcapsule devices. All these children—just like almost all the children in the United States and everywhere else—get their microcapsule injections as infants—takes care of measles, mumps, rubella, all of that, with a single one-time injection. The United Nations makes sure third-world countries are the highest regulated.

  “Everyone does it. Thousands of people even take their daily vitamins this way.”

  An epic convenience. Microcapsule medication was simple, efficient, and could be tailored specifically to the recipient.

  Jack remembered the men and children of Cayo Verad, and the enormous amount of microcapsules in their blood and soft tissue. He rocked back onto a sitting position.

  “The microcapsules are a delivery mechanism for the nanodevices, aren’t they? You’ve been seeding the world’s population for years and years, preparing for this.”

  Jack looked toward the children for some reason. The children behind the glass, as though in a museum.

  Mercedes gaped at them both. “No room—no room in Raines’ new world—for kids?”

  The uniformed man sobbed as he spoke. “We’re keeping some alive, a few, just enough to liven up the genetic pool, give people a little hope.”

  Jack considered this as rationally as he was able.

  The scope of what Raines wrought strained the limits of conceivability. Not only the diplomats, politicians, and celebritie
s from Espinosa’s celebration, but the young as well. “How many? Hundreds of millions?”

  The man nodded, still shedding tears. “More than you suspect. Almost everyone under fourteen years old.”

  Mercedes picked up the baton. “Get out of my way, Jack.”

  “Hang on.” To the other man, he said, “Tell it to us. All of it. We’ll know if you’re lying.” He held the man’s shattered wrist between his fingers, as gently as he would bird bones. “Don’t lie.”

  Once triggered, the devices went active for a period of several hours. The first thing they did was report back to an online database, to check for additional instructions. Then they monitored the host, compared the current health conditions with the databases they were tied into on the net. They were designed to make full use of the natural electrical field generated by a human body; designed to move quickly from one part of the host to another. Because the electrical field was generated by chemical reactions within each cell, the devices could directly interact with the field.

  Communication and diagnosis alone required an enormous amount of energy. The devices could tap into sub-cellular powerhouses, such as the host’s mitochondria, to remain active.

  If they didn’t receive instructions, they went about the essentially quotidian tasks of cellular housekeeping—cleaning up arteries, repairing frayed telomere endings, calibrating chemical balances in the brain and spine.

  Raines called it ‘the Adam and Eve Effect’.

  If no additional instructions were received, the devices did as much work as they could, moved to the lower digestive tract, and went inert. Since the devices dealt with health issues on a sub-cellular—even a genetic—level, the effects were long term or permanent. Normally the host had no idea the devices were even present.

  “Normally?” Mercedes pressed.

  “Mr. Raines modified the instructions in the secondary code. He changed the default behavior for—well, almost everyone. Mr. Raines is a great man. The devices are not going to go inert.”

  Mercedes leaned in, close. “When the next signal goes out, the nanodevices will activate all the potential energy in their host, right?”

  Her finality, her focus nearly caused Jack to miss the meaning behind what she said. “You came here to watch these children burst into flame, didn’t you?”

  Mercedes paled. “How long?”

  He hesitated. “Mr. Raines is a great man!”

  She shook him. “How long until the second signal goes out?”

  “When we came down here to watch, there was twenty, maybe fifteen minutes left on the clock before we can send the signal.”

  “How much longer?”

  “I don’t know! You broke my watch!”

  “All this time talking,” Mercedes said. “We have to run, Jack.”

  Jack used up twenty more seconds asking directions, creatively, while Mercedes spoke quietly to the children. There was no point figuring how to break them out of their Plexiglas prison—not yet, anyway.

  “You.” She pointed at the twelve year-old. “You’re in charge until we get back. You take care of everybody smaller than you.”

  Socks made for great blindfold and gag material. “This might be a little salty.” Jack tied both the man’s socks over his eyes and mouth, and joined Mercedes at the door. The kids waved back.

  They sprinted together, stride for stride, down the hall and up the stairs. She was in terrific shape, Jack had to admit. Not even winded at the top.

  “I hate leaving that guy there,” he said.

  “If we fail, he gets the fireworks show he wants,” she responded.

  The rooms they passed on the right were labs and medical bays, filled with racks of diagnostic equipment. All were empty.

  The corridor was lit by a weird, white light spilling from a series of long observation windows on the left. Immediately on the other side of the tempered, reinforced glass lay the largest room they’d yet seen. Even running, Jack was able to catch impressions and glimpses of its contents. A ring of stainless steel machines, squat and glossy, each with a brilliant silvery tube extending from its apex up through the roof. The light came from these conduits, watery and wavering. The machines sat on a black circular platform, a full story above another identical set of machines.

  Racks of servers and other equipment Jack hardly recognized linked into the main generator ring. That’s what this room had to be, nothing else. There was power in that room, planet-busting power.

  The hum he’d noticed earlier was stronger now, grinding the air around them.

  “Is that a generator?” Mercedes asked.

  “Ian described something similar in the basement underneath Raines’ headquarters in London,” he said. “If we can’t get to the transmitter, we’ll blow that.”

  Of course he had no idea how to do that. Hell of a plan B, Jack.

  How much time left? It made sense that there was a window of opportunity, a span of time in which the second signal could go out. And how long was that?

  Furtive voices ahead caused them to slow. The corridor cornered hard right into something like an elevator lobby, with hallways branching off three walls. Larger doors, steel sliders which led to the generator room, filled one wall. Looked like they’d been stolen right out of the Fortress of Solitude. Reflections of light and movement glimmered in the polished obsidian floor.

  Jack heard the unmistakable sound of magazines being pressed into weapons and bolts drawing back.

  He almost threw his last grenade right there, but stopped. Something was off. Mercedes at his shoulder, they both crept quietly to the corner, and listened. He noticed she held her pistol at the ready, low, index finger extended rather than touching the trigger.

  Four people moving around, a fifth man, stationary, speaking. “His private offices on the mountainside were breached a few minutes ago. Mr. Raines fine; the intruder doesn’t know he’s there.

  “He is holding Mr. Marduk at gunpoint. Mr. Marduk sent us a secure text two minutes ago, looks as though he typed it while he was walking. They are moving toward us; going to come right through that door.

  “Form up to flank. We’ll open fire when they pass through—go for a headshot but do not take the shot as long as Mr. Marduk is in the field of fire. You two, on the side. Your job is to pull Mr. Marduk to safety. I don’t want your weapons anywhere near you. Stack them in the corner. Sidearms too.”

  “Someone climbed all the way up the mountain? One guy, by himself? Same guy penetrated the ops center this morning?” Nervous laughter followed.

  “Yes, Bolotski, the very same man who ran through a mortar barrage and jumped over the wall.” The speaker was disgusted. “Get it together, Bolotski. One more story about ghosts or Dutch pirates or Springheeled Jack and I’m benching your ass. Look sharp, all of you.”

  Jack and Mercedes retreated a dozen steps and held a whispered conversation.

  “You’re a good runner,” he said. “Got a bit more in you?”

  She nodded. Probably knew where he was headed with this. She thrust her pistol into his hands. “You’re going to need two. It’ll just slow me down, anyway.” She fished an extra clip from her back pocket.

  Jack considered both guns. “Great. I’m, ah, really good with these.”

  Mercedes caught his eye with a wry expression. She knows I’m lying, he thought. How can she always know?

  Before she could speak, he added, “Wait until their backs are turned.” Jack took a breath, smiled. They were standing close, all but embracing. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  It was not a lie, he realized. Did she feel this weird point of calm, of balance? It was like a jockey poised on a single, steady point, saddle-back on a pitching stallion.

  He carried the moment of serenity around the corner with him. Seven men in the room, fully equipped with MP5s and semi-automatic pistols like the ones he carried. Their focus lay on a set of double doors at the end of the hall, but two of them caught his movement out of the corner of the
ir eye and blinked, astonished.

  Polished obsidian floors, ceiling, walls. Recessed lighting. Bit of an Art Deco feel to the place. With all these hard, brittle surfaces, bullets would ricochet in the room and deflect down the hallway. There were too many barrels to predict and forecast the angles to keep Mercedes safe.

  He knew what he had to do. Play this right and she’d make it at least as far as the hallway leading up to fresh air. Had to admit: he was curious to find out which of his friends was about to walk through the door.

  Jack reversed his grip on the guns. “Which one of you is Bolotski?” he said, causing all but one of them to wince. He handed his guns to the man, who didn’t quite fumble his own weapon.

  He enjoyed their confusion, marking which man among them was their leader (the guy getting all the bewildered looks) and was trying to think of something clever to say when the doors opened with a sigh of polished steel on stone.

  Slips Past

  “So, George,” said the FBI man. “May I call you George? So, we found your name on some interesting papers a few days ago. In an abandoned hospital, actually; looked quite a bit like this one.”

  Ian’s voice echoed in the long, straight tunnel. “The hospital was on an island called Cayo Verad. Have you ever been to Cayo Verad, George?”

  Marduk smiled thinly. Only a complete fool thought up clever things to say at gunpoint. When faced with the likelihood of being shot, it required an especially pathetic kind of crazy to make jokes. Small talk was inconceivable. The gun in the hands of the FBI man was the most important aspect of their relationship at the moment, and Marduk wasn’t really paying attention to anything the other man said as they marched toward the power control area.

  Ian kept a careful distance between them, a solid ten feet, nearly half the width of the tunnel. Semicircular arches of gleaming ferroconcrete in the ceiling repeated every thirty steps or so; they telescoped before and behind them, circular patterns in the curving wall that looked like the grooves inside a gun barrel—what was that called? Rifling, that’s right. Made the bullet spin as it traveled through the barrel, though why such a thing was necessary was beyond Marduk’s understanding of firearms. He supposed it had to do with accuracy over distance, or the Coriolis effect.