by David Archer
Sarah nodded, then got up and went to let them in while Noah looked at Neil and raised his eyebrows. “She means she doesn’t think she needs to be jealous of your new sister,” Neil whispered, and Noah nodded.
“I know,” he whispered back. “I just don’t understand why she’d be worried about it.”
“That’s because you don’t understand women. You don’t, not even a little bit.”
The five of them decided to go out to the Sagebrush Saloon for dinner, since it was the last time they would all be together for quite some time. Neil rode with Marco and Renée, while Noah and Sarah followed in the Corvette.
The hostess met them at the door and showed them to a table. Sarah asked if Elaine was working, but the hostess frowned.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “Elaine quit a couple of days ago. I understand she’s going to be working with her dad in his office, now.”
“Well, that sucks,” Sarah said as they took their seats. “I’m gonna miss her here.”
“She probably quit because of us,” Neil said. “Every time we came in, it kind of smacked her in the face that Moose is gone, you know? I guess quitting was easier than feeling that pain every time we came through the door.”
“You’re probably right,” Noah said. “Most people who lose a loved one tend to sever ties with people they were close to. I suspect we’ll only be seeing Elaine by chance or when it’s unavoidable from now on.”
Sarah looked at him for a moment but didn’t say anything. When the waitress approached and passed out menus, she managed to smile again. They each ordered their favorites and enjoyed dinner together.
Afterward, since Noah was scheduled to be leaving in the morning, Marco and Renée invited Neil out for the evening. Noah urged him to accept, then took Sarah home to spend a quiet evening together. Instead of watching television like usual, though, the two of them sat and talked until midnight, and then made their way to the bedroom and simply cuddled.
When morning came, they rose together. Noah had already packed a bag for his trip and loaded it into the back seat of Sarah’s car. For once, it would be Sarah dropping Noah off instead of the other way around. They made a quick stop at a fast-food place for breakfast and then drove out to R&D. Sarah kissed Noah goodbye as he grabbed his bag and got out of her car, and then drove carefully back toward Doc Parker’s office. Noah pretended not to see the tears in her eyes.
He stepped into the R&D building, and the security guard checked his ID, just like always. Wally was actually waiting for him this time and led him back toward the automotive section as soon as security cleared him.
“Camelot,” Wally said as they made their way down the central hall of the building, “you’re gonna love this car! I told the auto shop to give you something that can help you accomplish your mission, and they went all out. Just wait till you see it; you’ll know what I mean.”
“Sounds good,” Noah said. “Molly told me it’s a Charger?”
“Yep, a ’69, but with a few special options the Duke boys never had,” Wally said. “Just wait, you’re gonna love it.”
They came to a large double door, and Wally led the way into the automotive garage, a cavernous room with a dozen different workstations. This is where the organization’s cars were built and maintained, and it was put under Wally’s supervision because some of the cars needed special capabilities, especially those used by the teams when they were on mission.
Wally waved, and a short man in mechanics’ coveralls smiled and waved back. “That’s Rodney,” Wally said. “Rodney’s my right-hand man in the automotive section. I tell him what I want; then I just turn him loose. In this case, I told him I wanted a car that could help you accomplish an extremely difficult mission and gave him the general parameters. Let’s go see what he came up with.”
Noah followed Wally over to where Rodney stood waiting beside a beautiful Dodge Charger that had been painted in a flat black. The windows were tinted so dark that it was almost impossible to see through them at all, and a chromed blower and scoop sticking up through the hood told Noah there was some serious power in its engine. Wally made the introductions, and Noah and Rodney shook hands.
“Okay, Rodney,” Wally said. “Tell Noah what you built for him, here.”
Rodney grinned as he looked at the car. “Well, you can see that it’s a 1969 Dodge Charger, but it’s been built for speed. It’s powered by a supercharged and fuel-injected 540-cubic-inch hemi crate motor cranking out over nine hundred horsepower. I backed that up with a six-speed automatic transmission that’s been built to handle it, and some bulletproof rear gears that will let you hit two hundred miles per hour if necessary, while still giving you enough off-the-line torque to leave just about any other car sitting still. I built it with a keyless ignition system, so everything is controlled by the remote.” He handed Noah something that looked like a fancy cigarette lighter with a number of buttons on it. “We used the standard icons. You can see which button unlocks the car or locks it, opens the trunk—there is a safe in the trunk, by the way, one that is already programmed to your right thumbprint. But the car has one really special feature that I’m kind of proud of. See the button down there that has an icon that looks like a whistle? You push that button anywhere within fifty miles of that car, and it will come to you. It has self-driving capability built into it, even better than Google’s, and you can even use it when you just want to relax and let the car do the driving. Just put in the address of where you’re going, and a little icon of a driver will appear on the screen. If you touch the icon, the self-driving application turns on and you can kick back and get some rest. If you touch anywhere else, it just cancels it and leaves it under your control.”
Noah nodded appreciatively as he opened the driver’s door and tossed his bag into the back seat, then looked around the interior. Even there, he felt a sense of perfection, as if every aspect of the car had been carefully done by a master craftsman. “It’s incredible,” he said. “It ought to be in a museum somewhere.”
“Why?” Rodney asked. “It’s a car, not a statue. I built it to get you where you need to go and help you accomplish what you need to do. If people want to admire it, let them admire it at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, that’s how I feel about it.”
Noah’s eyebrows went up a half inch. “Okay, then,” he said. “Wally says it’s got some other special features?”
Rodney grinned broadly and nodded. “Oh, boy, does it ever,” he said. “The body is made entirely of Kevlar, rather than the normal sheet steel. Slide in behind the wheel, and let me give you the full tour.”
Noah sat down in the car and looked over the dashboard and console.
“Wally said he wanted you to have a car that would help you accomplish your mission, sort of like James Bond and his Aston Martin,” Rodney said, as he sat down in the passenger seat. “To me, that means he wants the car to have lots of features you can use to get things done or keep you safe. Slip your right hand down alongside the seat, and you’ll find a row of buttons hidden down there. Go ahead, you need to know where they’re at.”
Noah reached down between the seat and the console and found the buttons Rodney was talking about. “Five buttons, right?”
Rodney nodded. “Exactly. Push the first button and watch what happens.”
Noah looked him in the eye for a moment, then pushed the first button as he was told. A video display in the dashboard had been showing stereo and satellite radio controls, but suddenly it changed. It showed the scene directly ahead of the car, and Noah looked at it for a moment before turning back to Rodney.
“Touch the screen on something that moves,” Rodney said.
Another technician was walking across the garage in front of the car, so Noah touched his image on the screen. Instantly, he was surrounded by two bright red concentric circles, with crossed lines centered over his body. The image stayed on him as he walked, keeping him centered.
“Crosshairs?” Noah asked.
“Yes,” Rodney replied. “Tapping an item on the screen tells the targeting computer to lock onto it. Now, on the back of the steering wheel there’s a button on each side—feel them? Those are the triggers: if you squeeze one while targeting is activated, the headlight doors open silently, and there’s a small machine gun mounted on gimbals between the bulbs of the right headlight that will unload on whatever you targeted. It fires 9 mm bullets at fifteen rounds a second, and it’s loaded with two thousand of them. It has a forty-five-degree field of fire and will keep firing as long as you squeeze the trigger.”
Noah nodded. “That’s pretty cool,” he said.
“Now push the second button.”
Noah did so and the crosshairs on the screen suddenly turned yellow. “A different weapon?”
Rodney grinned at him. “High-explosive rounds fired from a modified 12-gauge shotgun shell. It’s like a mini grenade launcher, and the same trigger buttons are used to make it fire. The rounds are made from one of our proprietary superexplosives. There’s a primer embedded inside that sets it off when it strikes the target. You only have twenty-four rounds, so use them sparingly. Next button.”
Noah pressed the third button and an infrared image of the garage ahead was suddenly projected onto the windshield, complete with heat-generated images of the people working there.
“Forward-looking infrared radar,” Rodney said. “It will show you thermal images, even through conventional walls, combined with computer-enhanced radar images. Lets you know where the bad guys are hiding and makes it possible to drive at night without lights. It gives you a very realistic view of what’s ahead, but this can only be seen from inside the vehicle. As bright as it looks, nobody outside could see it at all.”
Noah nodded. “I can see how that might come in handy,” he said.
“Next button,” Rodney said, and Noah pressed it. The video display suddenly showed a clear image of what was behind the car, and Noah could hear the audio through the speakers. “You have 360-degree video capability through a camera that pops out of the roof. Just touch the corner of the screen and you can rotate the camera all the way around. If you find something you want to zoom in on, just tap the center twice. If you want to record the video, just squeeze one of the trigger buttons on the steering wheel. The hard drive built into this car can handle several hundred hours of video, so don’t worry about running out of space. When you push the button again or choose another one, the camera retracts and is invisible.” Rodney pulled the seat belt around himself and buckled it. “Okay, let’s take the car out for a drive so you can try the last button.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Noah buckled his own seat belt and reached up to start the car. It used a keyless ignition system that only required him to push a button, and then he put the car in gear and drove it out of the garage toward the test track behind the building.
“Take a couple of laps around the track,” Rodney said, “just to get the feel of the car. Don’t be afraid to put your foot into it; this thing can handle the curves and corners.”
Noah drove onto the track and pressed down on the accelerator. There were no other cars on it, so he had it all to himself.
The Charger shot forward with enough acceleration to slam him back into his seat, and Noah could tell the engine was everything Rodney had said it was. The car eased through the first couple of curves, and then Noah drifted it around a corner at more than sixty miles per hour. Rodney was holding on to the door and the dashboard, but there was a huge grin on his face.
“That’s it,” Rodney said, “that’s it. I knew you’d be able to handle this thing—you just got that look about you.” He continued to hold on to the door and the dash as Noah made two complete circuits of the track, which was a little over two miles long overall.
As they came around to begin the third lap, lining up on a straightaway that was almost half a mile long itself, Rodney told Noah to push the last button. Noah did so, and suddenly the roar of the engine almost doubled in volume. The car launched forward again, and Noah saw the speedometer go from eighty miles per hour to over one fifty in just a few short seconds.
“Nitrous oxide?” Noah asked, but Rodney shook his head.
“Nope,” he replied. “That last button kicks in a hidden supercharger that’s built into the intake manifold. It’s powered by a supersmall electric motor that runs on a four-hundred-volt lithium-ion battery. It’s only good for about three minutes at a time, and then the battery needs about an hour of engine time to recharge. When it kicks in, this car can do about two hundred and twenty miles per hour, but not even this car can take any serious curves, not at that speed. Use it carefully, though, and you can drastically cut down travel time from one place to another.”
Noah was easing down on the brakes, getting the car back under control. He was still going faster than he liked when he entered the first curve, but the car drifted like it was made for that purpose. By the time he reached the second curve, he was back down to a reasonable speed.
“Couple other features,” Rodney said. “The body was handmade right here in our shop, out of carbon fiber and Kevlar. All of the glass is polycarbonate and almost half an inch thick, and there is a polycarb deflection shield between the grille and the radiator that lets plenty of air through, but nothing else. A fifty-caliber round fired at point-blank range will do a little damage, but anything farther away or smaller than that won’t even scratch the paint.” He chuckled, and Noah nodded appreciatively. “The tires are filled with a foam rubber that was developed for the space program. They can’t go flat, and it would take an awful lot of bullets to even make one ride rough. Oh, and the gas tank is a thirty-gallon fuel cell. You could shoot holes in it with a machine gun and it would never explode. Just a little safety feature I thought might come in handy.”
“I’m definitely impressed,” Noah said. “Anything else I should know about it?”
“Yeah,” Rodney said. “The built-in computer can tell you just about anything you want to know about the car. Tap the info button on the screen twice, and it will give you a readout that tells you how many rounds you have left in the weapons, the status of the supercharger’s battery, and how many data files you saved. There’s a USB port just under the display so that you can download those files to a computer if you want to. It also has an intelligent security system. Whenever you lock the car up, it automatically keeps track of anybody who gets within ten feet of it, watching them with about a dozen different sensors. As long as they only look it doesn’t do anything, but if they touch the car they get a warning to back away. If anybody is stupid enough to try to break into it, they’re going to find themselves in sleepy land from an electric shock. If the car senses that it’s being hooked up to a wrecker or anything, it will set off an alarm that sounds like an air raid siren, call 911 and report itself being stolen, and if somebody manages to drag it away from where you left it, then it will send you a text message with its GPS coordinates every twenty minutes after that. The only way anyone would get into the car is by crushing it first, so you should be able to get it back.”
Wally was standing outside the garage when Noah pulled up beside him, and reached out to open the door. “Well?” Wally asked breathlessly. “What do you think?”
Noah looked up at him. “It’s awesome,” he said. “My only question is how am I supposed to justify having a car like this? Even without all its special features, this is a car that very few recently released convicts would be able to afford.”
“Allison will go over that with you,” Wally said. “I’m supposed to tell you to stop by her office as soon as you leave here. I guess they made some changes to your character profile and want to go over them with you.”
Noah nodded. “Okay. Got anything else for me here?”
“Nope,” Wally said. “I think that’s it. If you’re comfortable with the car, then I guess you’re ready to go.”
Noah nodded, then reached out and shook Wally’s hand. “Thank you ag
ain,” he said. He closed the door and put the car back into gear, heading for the gate that was already rolling open for him.
It didn’t take that long for him to make it into Kirtland, but that was partly because he was feeling out the power of the car. The digital speedometer in the instrument cluster was bouncing on one hundred and forty miles per hour on a couple of long straight stretches.
He parked the car in the underground garage and locked it with the keyless remote, then got into the elevator and rode up to Allison’s floor. Her secretary, a new girl that Noah didn’t recognize, told him that she was in a meeting and asked his name. As soon as she heard it, she went pale and told him to go right on in.
Allison looked up from her desk and smiled. “Camelot,” she said. “I won’t ask if you’re ready for this mission; I know that you are. I just wanted to go over a couple of details with you before you took off.”
Noah nodded and sat down in the chair in front of her desk. “Wally said you wanted to fill me in on how Rex Madison can afford the kind of supercar that usually only shows up in movies.”
Allison chuckled but nodded. “Yes, and it was your pal Molly who thought of it. Her plan called for you having a powerful car that would draw a lot of attention, so I sent her out to Wally’s to see what was available. She spotted that Charger and said that was ideal, so I told Wally to have his guys tweak it for you. Of course, Wally pointed out that the car was one that would cost a small fortune even without his special touches, so I told Molly it might not be practical. She insisted that it was the perfect car, though, so we had to do a couple of things with your character to make it fit.”
She pulled open a desk drawer and picked up a thick package, holding it out for Noah. He took it and glanced inside to see a dozen large bundles of hundred-dollar bills.
“A lot of cash,” he said. “How does this fit with me just getting out of prison?”