Linkage (The Narrows of Time Series Book 1)

by Jay J. Falconer

  He intended to pull behind the van and park, but changed his mind when he noticed two armed guards standing next to it, on the side facing the house. His mother was being escorted out of the house by another pair of men, one alongside her and supporting her right arm as she moved, and the other was two steps behind, carrying a pair of suitcases, and a knapsack over his left shoulder.

  As the Humvee cruised a little closer, Lucas realized the person escorting his mother by the arm was Bruno, his favorite campus security guard and king of the sugar junkies. Lucas studied the face on the other man to see who it was. He recognized him, too, but did a double-take to confirm . . . yes, the man carrying the baggage was him!

  “What the hell?” he snapped, frowning in confusion. Maybe he’d been hit on the head while he was drugged? His mind must’ve been playing tricks on him, that’s all he could figure.

  He decided to check a third time in order to convince himself he wasn’t going crazy. He closed his eyes tight, took two deep breaths to calm himself, then looked again. Shit, he wasn’t seeing things. The man carrying the suitcases was him.

  This isn’t possible, he told himself. Is it?

  It was clear from Dorothy’s smile and demeanor that she believed her escort was Lucas. But how could she not know the man walking with her was an imposter? A mother knows these things, right? She knew Lucas better than anyone else in the world, except for maybe Drew. That meant only one thing: the charlatan wasn’t simply an actor, and his resemblance must’ve been more than just superficial. His mother was being fooled and probably in trouble, he decided.

  Lucas lowered his head and drove past the house, hoping to avoid detection. There was plenty of ambient light from the moon, but nobody seemed to notice him or the Humvee as he drove slowly by the house.

  At the end of the street, he turned off the truck’s headlights and made a U-turn, parking behind a dented and scratched four-door GMC Dually truck on the opposite side of the street. A stack of inner tubes was tied down inside the bed of the gas-guzzler using bungee cords, and its front wheels were parked up on the sidewalk at a sharp angle, probably due to the driver having one too many six packs at the indoor water park Lucas knew was only a mile away.

  He got out of the stolen Humvee and snuck along the street until he made his way to the house next to his mother’s. He crouched down behind the three-foot-tall hedge separating the two lawns, giving him a clear view of the front yard and the waiting van. The sliding side door was open, but shadows cast by the halogen streetlamps partially obscured the interior from view.

  Bruno opened the passenger door and helped Dorothy into the front seat, then walked around the front of the van and got in the driver’s seat. A black laptop computer case with an LA Kings’ hockey sticker on its front pocket was slung over his shoulder. Lucas recognized the computer—it was his. He’d put the sticker on the case just a few months before.

  The red-haired man impersonating him approached the vehicle’s open side cargo door. The phony handed both suitcases to one of the armed guards already inside, then stepped up and entered the vehicle himself. Seconds later, the other guard joined them and the sliding door slammed shut.

  Part of Lucas was impressed. The man pretending to be him moved exactly like he did—his walk, his mannerisms, his facial expressions, everything. But only part of him was impressed—the rest was furious about his mother being kidnapped under the guise of friendship and family. He wasn’t about to let this charade continue and needed to expose it, but first he needed a plan. Those armed guards wouldn’t like someone sneaking up and causing hell, so caution was in order.

  Lucas went back to the Humvee and waited to turn on his headlights until after Bruno flipped a U-turn and drove down the street in the opposite direction. Lucas put the transmission into drive and followed the university van for the next hour as Bruno worked his way through traffic, traveling west across the north side of town. Lucas kept the Humvee back at a safe distance, trying not to be spotted as a tail. His plan seemed to work. It wasn’t difficult to blend in with the numerous Army trucks interspersed within the civilian traffic.

  Bruno made a sudden turn and drove south along the access road bordering the Loop 101 Freeway until he reached the Glendale Hockey Arena’s front-side parking lot. The van drove down a sharp incline and disappeared into an underground garage. To the right of the ramp’s entrance was a twenty-foot-wide sign that read:

  ARENA RENOVATION

  General Contractor: BTX ENTERPRISES

  Lucas knew Dr. Kleezebee’s development company had purchased the vacant hockey building and was in the process of renovating it, but he’d never set foot inside the arena. He’d seen it on TV many times, the last being two years earlier, right before the Arizona Coyotes filed for bankruptcy—a second time—and then relocated to Mexico. Nobody expected the financially strapped team to thrive in Mexico, but it did. To this day, he never got used to saying “Los Coyotes.”

  Lucas waited five minutes before driving the Humvee down the entrance ramp. Inside, he only found one other vehicle—Bruno’s security van. It was parked backward in the very last row, only about twenty feet from his current position. He could see the empty front seat of the van and its cargo door. The van looked abandoned.

  He looked around to see where Bruno and crew had taken his mother. There were only four exits on the sublevel, including the entrance ramp behind him. At the far end of the garage was the main elevator and its adjoining stairs, but the white university van wasn’t parked anywhere near them. The only other choice was a closed orange door, which was about ten feet on the other side of the van.

  Lucas pulled forward slowly and parked the Humvee nose-to-nose with the van. He set the parking brake and got out. The soldier’s gun was in his right hand as he looked through the van’s driver-side window. No one was inside. He tried peering inside the van’s rear windows, but they were heavily tinted and the garage lighting was poor. He couldn’t see much of anything. He went to open the double doors on the back of the van, yanking hard, but they were locked.

  He walked to the orange door he saw on the way in and put his left hand on the doorknob. The plan was to carefully open it and sneak inside, but he stopped his hand from turning the knob when he heard voices coming from the other side. He leaned in close to the door and pressed his left ear against it to listen.

  One of the voices he heard was a perfect rendition of his own. There was a friendly argument happening between the imposter and Bruno—something about who “should go first.” He didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were kidding around like old chums at happy hour. The imposter certainly had everyone fooled—except him. He listened for his mother’s voice but didn’t hear the familiar melody of her words.

  A handful of seconds later, an electrical hum rattled the doorframe, startling him for a second. Inside, a female’s voice said, “Please step onto the pad. Activation sequence will begin in thirty seconds. Remember not to hold your breath.” It wasn’t his mom’s voice. It was someone else.

  Lucas slowly twisted the doorknob, trying to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. It was locked.

  Again, he heard the same female speak on the other side of the entrance. “Please step onto the pad. Activation sequence will begin in thirty seconds. Remember not to hold your breath.” Both times the woman spoke, she used the exact same inflections and timing, making her voice sound artificial, like a recording.

  He waited and listened for another few minutes, but heard nothing else from the other side. It was time to break in, he decided, kicking at the metal door. But it wouldn’t open. He tried again and again, each time getting nowhere. A new plan was needed, so he hustled back to the Humvee and searched it for tools. There wasn’t much useful inside other than a heavy-duty scissors jack stuffed in a recessed sidewall compartment behind the rear seat, and a three-foot-long tire iron with a tapered end like a screwdriver. It was wedged inside a form-fitting cutout just below the scissors jack. A second later,
the steel bar was in his hands and he was sprinting back to the orange door with the intention of using it as a crowbar.

  He took aim, then jammed the bar’s tapered end into the doorjamb with a single thrust, splitting the metal seam next to the lock. He wiggled and pushed the tire iron farther into the crack before leveraging his weight against the bar. It worked; the door popped open with a creak of metal and a crack as the lock assembly finally broke in half. He flattened himself against the outside wall and waited to see if anyone came running after all the noise he’d just made.

  No one came.

  He let out the breath he’d been holding in his lungs and put the bar on the cement floor before walking inside with the loaded gun out in front of him. He snuck along the brick wall lining the hallway until he came to a chamber about the size of a 7-Eleven convenience store.

  Inside, he discovered two stacks of blinking electronic equipment with a metal desk and computer console sitting in front. It was all black and chrome and looked incredibly high-tech—definitely out of place in an abandoned sports arena. He checked the room, but there was no sign of his mother or anyone else—the place was empty. He didn’t understand how, but it was.

  A clear cylinder about the size of a phone booth stood in the center of the room. It was a few feet taller than Lucas and resembled an oversized pneumatic tube, like those used by a bank in its drive-through lane.

  On the left side of the tube, a bundle of gray-and-black cables snaked their way along the floor, connecting the tube to the electronic equipment. The cylinder’s base was a round pad about three inches thick and four feet in diameter. Its surface was shiny and appeared to be made of glass, or possibly an acrylic. The pad was sectioned off into four pie-shaped triangles of different colors: red, blue, orange, and green.

  When Lucas approached the cylinder, its enclosure rotated automatically, revealing two clear, overlapping glass tubes, one inside the other. The glass rings continued moving in opposite directions until a man-sized opening appeared. The device wanted him to step inside. He was tempted, but decided to wait. More information was needed.

  He went to the computer desk, where a rotating 3D font was spinning on the computer’s twenty-inch monitor. The phrase BTX ENTERPRISES danced across the screen in block letters, taking turns bouncing off the four edges of the display. He didn’t see a mouse or keyboard, so he touched the screen to deactivate the screen saver. The computer display changed to show:

  NETWORK CONSOLE: JUMP PAD 13

  Destination: Silo 3Status: Online / Ready

  Comm: SyncStream: Outbound

  Core: Charged Buffer: Waiting

  ENGAGECANCEL

  “Jump Pad Thirteen . . . Comm Sync . . . Buffer waiting,” he mumbled aloud, working through the details in his brain. The device must be some type of streaming communication system, he decided, and it was connected to a silo. Apparently not the only one Kleezebee owned, either, since it showed silo number three.

  He used his finger to press the ENGAGE button. A female voice instantly said, “Please step onto the pad. Activation sequence will begin in thirty seconds. Remember not to hold your breath.” Her voice came at him from every direction and was obviously being artificially generated by the technology in the room. His eyes darted from left to right, scanning the walls and ceiling, but he didn’t see any speakers.

  The computer’s voice spoke again. “Please step onto the pad. Activation sequence will begin in thirty seconds. Remember not to hold your breath.”

  “Ah, I don’t think so,” he said to her, taking a step back while thinking about the contents of the screen and the fact he was alone in the room. Then the answer hit him square in the forehead. The machine must have been some type of telepod or transporter. It would explain how they left.

  “Must have taken it to Silo Three, wherever that is,” he mumbled.

  The computer spoke again, issuing the same commands as before. He ignored it like before, returning to the vertical cylinder to consider his options. There were two choices: step onto the pad and take a ride, or abandon his intention to rescue his mother. If he gave up now, where would he go? What would happen to her if he didn’t chase after them? After a few more moments of deliberation, he decided the only choice was to risk the transporter, if that’s what this thing actually was.

  He stepped into the device, making sure the handgun he was holding did not damage the glass. Lights flashed and a high-decibel alarm blared through the room. Then the same female’s voice said, “This is a weapons-free zone! Please discard your weapon immediately. You have twenty seconds to comply or a nerve agent will be released.”

  A steel door slammed shut from the ceiling above, blocking his access to the entrance hallway. He was trapped inside the room. Then a four-foot-wide metal drawer slid open along the wall next to the electronic equipment.

  Lucas didn’t need to be told twice. He flew off the pad, ran to the deposit drawer, and tossed in the handgun. The drawer closed as soon as the weapon clanked along its bottom. He listened for the computer to respond, but she didn’t.

  “I just gave you the gun,” he shouted to the room, hoping she’d cancel the nerve agent threat. But he heard nothing. He waited for it, but didn’t hear the sound of gas being released. Maybe he was in the clear. He went back to the pad and stepped inside. This time its enclosure rotated closed without any alarms or warnings, allowing his heart rate and supercharged lungs to slow a bit.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the machine to do its thing while concentrating on his breathing, making sure to inhale and exhale normally as the computer told him to do. Everything was going fine until he started thinking about the 1986 movie The Fly. He suddenly worried he might come out the other end of the system as a hybrid organism, like the movie’s Brundle-Fly creature—half-human, half-fly. He opened his eyes and listened for insects buzzing around the telepod. There were none.

  Then the equipment powered up while he was checking for insects, making him hold his breath. He began to feel lightheaded, as if he were in a dream, floating above the clouds. It was almost a spiritual experience, which was more than strange since, unlike his brother, he didn’t believe in a supreme being. He preferred the hard reality of science and couldn’t fathom how his mother and brother could blindly follow church doctrine without a shred of proof or assurance.

  A long second later, he heard the same computerized female voice say, “Welcome to Silo Three.”

  Lucas pried his eyes open, expecting the worst. He looked down and checked all his body parts—each was intact and still human. So far, so good, he thought, as a wave of dizziness came over him. He stumbled a bit before throwing out his hands against the clear glass enclosure to catch his balance. A second later, the enclosure began to rotate open and he stepped out in a flash.

  He was in a room much like the one he’d just left: electronic equipment installed in wall-mounted enclosures along one side of the room and a stubby computer desk with a flashing monitor sitting on top of it.

  Lucas walked to the only door, opened it, and stepped into a featureless gray concrete hallway. Two people—a thirty-something male with thick, horn-rimmed glasses and a mousy looking younger female with her auburn hair pulled back in a tight bun—were approaching from his right. They were lab techs of some sort, judging by their identical white tunics and turquoise-colored surgical pants.

  They were shuffling their feet forward at half-speed, obviously in no hurry to get where they were going. The woman was eating a bagel while her colleague carried the conversation.

  It was too late to go back inside the room, so Lucas decided to stand there and act natural—maybe they wouldn’t notice him. However, a moment later, the man turned his eyes toward Lucas. It sent a wave of panic down Lucas’ spine.

  “Hello, Dr. Ramsay. Enjoying your visit so far?” the man asked, giving him a friendly, welcoming smile.

  Lucas was stunned for a second, then realized the man thought he was the imposter. He pushed throug
h his surprise and glanced at the man’s nametag to play along. “Yes, I am, Doctor . . . Khoury.”

  The girl flashed him a grin, too, but didn’t say anything as they cruised past him, heading down the hallway to the left.

  Lucas waited till they made the corner, then decided to head in the opposite direction, following three different colored floor stripes—red, orange, blue. They were painted down the middle of the cement floor and about four inches apart from each other.

  When the stripes branched off from each other, he went with his instinct and followed the red stripe, only because red was his favorite color. He needed to pick one, knowing that without additional data, the odds of selecting the correct stripe were thirty-three percent in his favor. Of course, the pessimist lurking inside his gray matter would say it was sixty-six against, but he chose to think positive. The red line led him down two more connecting hallways where he eventually found a half-dozen closed doors lining the wall on the right.

  The first door was labeled with a sign that read LAUNDRY. He kept on walking until he came upon another door that read SUPPLIES. He opened it and went inside.

  The room’s interior was just as he expected, two floor-to-ceiling metal shelves with cleaning supplies on one and office supplies on the other. There was a janitor’s mop and bucket, several worn yellow sponges, a pair of dirty yellow Converse sneakers that appeared to be older than he was, and a handful of fly-fishing magazines sitting under a box of Handi Wipes. A blue baseball cap with a crusted ring of sweat was draped over the end of the mop’s handle.

  Several waist-high rectangular signs were leaning up against the wall next to the door. Some of the printing was faded beyond recognition, but Lucas was able to make out TITAN II MISSILE SITE AZ-18 stenciled across the top of each sign. Just below the title was a single number, varying from 1 to 8, depending on which sign he looked at. Below each number was a differing floor plan with footprint icons leading to exterior doors.