“Glad you came lookin’,” Marshall said. His gaze took in the others. “All of you.” He pulled back when a teenage boy and girl stepped from around the truck. “Dolphin, Shamer, meet my best friend, Jake Bronson.”
The two kids bowed, smiled, and pointed up at the twisted glider. “Nice flying,” they said in unison. Pete scratched his chin and nodded.
“What is this, a conspiracy to beat down my ego?” Jake said. Leave it to Marshall to lighten things up when the going got tough. Jake appreciated it, though thoughts of his family made it impossible to relax. He managed a smile.
Pete motioned toward Dolphin and Shamer. “It was thanks to them that we were able to warn you in time.”
Marshall added, “And it’s also thanks to them that we know where Francesca and the kids have been taken.”
Jake spun toward them. “What? Where?”
That’s when the screams rang out.
They all turned toward the far end of the park and saw the six uniformed teens on the ground, some writhing and squirming, tearing at their wrists, shrieking in pain, some unmoving.
“BlackFlag!” Shamer screamed, her face twisted, her hand raised to her mouth.
Jake took it all in at once—the horrifying screams, Shamer’s reaction, Dolphin coiling to sprint toward them, Marshall grabbing the boy’s wrist, the pulsing green glow beneath the kid’s skin, the same glow on Shamer’s wrist, the girl sprinting away.
“Stop her!” Marshall cried. Jake’s feet were already moving. He caught her in three strides, wrapped an arm around her torso, lifting her off her feet, then carried her back to the group. Her body heaved with sobs and her arms were outstretched toward her friends on the ground. Pete and Marshall had hold of either of Dolphin’s arms, restraining him.
“What’s happening?” he cried out. “My friends!”
The main group of teens appeared from the shadows, and Jake saw the wide-eyed expressions of the ones at the front of the pack. A few started running toward their fallen comrades. Marshall grabbed Dolphin by the shoulders and said, “If you trust me, you must get them to stop. Otherwise, they—will—die.”
Dolphin’s face paled but he didn’t hesitate. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted in Chinese at the top of his lungs. Shamer joined in, and the running teens lurched to a stop. They slowly turned back to join Jake and the others.
Marshall still hadn’t released Dolphin. “We need a medical bag. Quick,” he said.
Pete motioned to Feng, who disappeared into the ambulance.
“Lay him down,” Marshall said to Pete. “Hold his wrist.”
Dolphin kicked and twisted. “What? No!”
“Don’t hurt him!” Shamer sobbed. The other teens watched.
Skylar and Lacey rushed to help by bracing the boy’s shoulders and arms. Feng crouched beside them and opened an expanding tackle box of medical gear.
“What are we doing?” Feng asked, snapping on a pair of blue medical gloves.
Marshall pointed to a scalpel. Feng nodded, grabbed it, and removed the sterile wrapper. Marshall leaned down and captured Dolphin’s gaze. “I need you to be brave, pal. We’ve got to get that chip out of you. It’s going to hurt.”
“But only a pinch,” Feng said. He plunged a prefilled hypodermic into the boy’s wrist, his movements swift and professional. Marshall gave him a questioning look.
“EMS tech,” Feng said. “Need one on every shoot. This’ll numb him up good.” He dropped the empty hypo into the case, grabbed the scalpel, and pressed it to the boy’s skin. “Feel that?”
Dolphin’s eyes were saucers and his voice leaked out tentatively. “Uh, nooo... ”
Twenty seconds later, the glowing chip lay in a baggie, and Feng was stitching the wound closed. He looked over at Jake and Shamer. “Next.”
Shamer fainted.
Chapter 15
Hong Kong
JAKE PACED AS THE OTHERS settled around two bar tables in the Wreck Room. His nerves were ragged and his mind was reeling. He still couldn’t fathom the depth of evil of a man who’d tried to murder over a hundred innocent kids, the same man who supposedly held Jake’s family.
Marshall’s swift actions had saved all but six of them, first from the fire, and later from the deadly chips buried under their skin. Jake and his friends had slipped away unnoticed, but not before waiting for additional emergency personnel to arrive to take care of the rest of the teens.
Marshall held up the baggie with the two bloody chips they’d removed from Dolphin and Shamer. A black, gooey substance stained the inside of the bag. “They burst open when we drove past the other...children.” His voice faltered and he glanced at Dolphin and Shamer, who sat beside him with bandages around their wrists. Their eyes were red and puffy. Marshall sighed. “The chips must’ve been programmed to go off when they traveled beyond a certain distance from the facility. Sort of like an ankle bracelet. Step beyond the line and an alarm goes off. Except these suckers were designed to empty poison into the body.”
Lacey placed a hand on Shamer’s uninjured arm. “Thank God we happened to stop in the park.”
Dolphin looked at Marshall. “And thank TurboHacker for knowing what to do.”
Shamer nodded. “You saved our lives.”
“And you saved mine,” Marshall said.
Pete shook his head. “Embedded poison chips? The ultimate failsafe for a paranoid megalomaniac.”
Jake turned toward them. “Yeah, but this operation is way too big to be a one-man show. They had teams in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Rome, with connections to Interpol, the Italian GIS, and even inside Doc’s top-secret organization. And now they’re willing to kill scores of their own employees to cover their tracks as they make off to some remote jungle headquarters in China?”
Marshall said, “And it would’ve worked, if everyone had been trapped inside when the incendiaries went off.” He turned to the teens. “Are you certain you can locate their base?”
Shamer sniffled. “We were only there once. They allowed us to go with BlackFlag when he returned home for his father’s funeral. It was a rare exception to be allowed contact with family members but DarkMatter had strong family ties there. So he allowed it. It was sad.”
“I remember the way,” Dolphin said. “The windy road, the mountains, the jungle, the ten-hour drive...BlackFlag’s mom weeping. We met some of DarkMatter’s cousins at the funeral. Everyone in the village attended.”
“Not everyone,” Shamer said. “None of the people working in the headquarters building attended. And none of the soldiers.”
Pete leaned in. “Soldiers?”
Jake shook his head.
Marshall said, “I’ll bet they weren’t Chinese regulars, right?”
“No,” Dolphin said. “They wore the same type uniforms the mercenaries do in the video game.”
Marshall nodded. “It figures. The players targeted on the leader board were gatekeepers from all over the globe, including China, which means we’re dealing with a rogue operation of some sort.”
“But why go to the trouble of grabbing us from all over the world?’ Jake said. “They had us in their sights so why not just pull the trigger?” His mind raced. “And how is Everlast connected? And why the hell did they need a top-of-the-line editing bay?”
Shamer and Dolphin exchanged a glance. Dolphin said, “We heard about that. It was a separate project of some sort. Very secret.”
“But very important,” Shamer added. “Three of the yellows came from the film industry. They arrived a week ago. They kept to themselves, especially since they couldn’t talk code like the rest of us. But they were very busy the last couple days.”
“See?” Jake said. “What’s that all about?” The words tumbled out even as his mind flashed through the past seventy-two hours. The crew who’d tried to run him off the road back home, wearing camera-glasses, the same type the GIS operators had worn in Italy. And then there was the camera in the interrogation room in Amsterdam. “They
’re capturing video of everything. But why? And why am I at the center of it?”
He started pacing again, breathing hard, trying to force his mind to make the connections for him to understand what was going on. But his brain wasn’t cooperating and his frustration mounted. He stopped short when he felt Marshall’s hand on his shoulder.
“This isn’t just about you, Jake,” Marshall said. “They grabbed me because of my online handle.”
He spun around. “Your what?”
“TurboHacker.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
Marshall exchanged a glance with Dolphin and Shamer.
Dolphin spoke up first. “It has everything to do with it. He’s been at the top of the leader board since the beginning.” He seemed to brighten up, and Jake marveled at the kid’s resilience.
“The leader board?”
Marshall opened his mouth but Shamer cut him off. “The game? Spider? Hello!”
Jake frowned, more confused than ever. He looked from the teens to Marshall. “So this is all about a video game?”
Dolphin and Shamer nodded, but Marshall shook his head.
“It’s way more than that,” Marshall said. “The Spider game is only a means to an end. I suspect DarkMatter—Jiaolong—is using it to somehow probe the brains of the players.”
“Sure,” Shamer said. “But only to make the game better.”
“That’s right,” Dolphin said. “It all started with Find the Card.”
“What’s that now?” Pete asked.
Dolphin said, “It’s a game we used to play when we first started beta testing. Prior to game play, random playing cards were dealt to each of the sixteen greens scheduled to play. The card values were kept secret from one another, and the players split up and hid them in random places throughout the facility. The more remote the hiding place, the better.”
“Then after each session,” Shamer said, “the players gathered together and DarkMatter would guess the value of each player’s card, as well as its hiding spot. At first it was hit or miss. He’d guess a few cards correctly, and maybe one or two hiding places. And the next day a new group would play and he’d do it all over again. It wasn’t a big secret or anything. He and the yellows were working on a biofeedback subroutine that would ultimately allow us to create a more personalized gaming experience for each player. It’s the wave of the future.”
“You said you used to play this Find the Card game?” Lacey asked.
“We stopped about six months ago,” Dolphin said. “By then, DarkMatter could identify every card and its location with one hundred percent accuracy. Is that important?”
Marshall locked eyes with Jake. “It is when we consider that the current list of players consists of the gatekeepers for top-secret networks across the globe.”
There was a moment of stunned silence as the ramifications set in.
“Bloody hell,” Pete finally said.
Skylar shook her head, Lacey bit her lip, and Jake’s gut did a somersault.
“So that’s why they were looking for TurboHacker?” he asked.
Marshall waited a long moment before answering. “Well, that’s just it, Jake. It wasn’t really me they were after.” He blew out a breath. “It was Alex.”
The news knocked the wind from Jake’s lungs. Marshall reached out, but Jake pushed him away.
“So what’s next?” Skylar asked.
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve got a plan.”
“Lay it on us,” Marshall said.
“First, I’m going to need you and Lacey to get back home and—”
Marshall waved a hand. “Don’t even think about it.”
“But it’s important—”
“Dude, I know you, remember? Don’t give me that crap. I know what you’re trying to do.”
Jake grunted in frustration. “You’re finally safe, damn it. I want to keep you that way!”
“Screw that. You’re not going anywhere without me.”
Lacey was quick to join him. “Or me,” she said, crossing her arms. Dolphin and Shamer rose to stand beside them.
Jake turned to Pete. “You’ve done so much already. But this isn’t your fight—” He stopped when Feng marched into the room with another man. They were dressed in Chinese army uniforms.
“The bribes have been paid and accepted and the trucks are outside,” Feng said, tossing Jake a compact satellite phone. “The rest of the gear is already loaded. Let’s go.”
Pete winked. “Does that answer yer question?”
Marshall patted Jake on the shoulder. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
Jake clenched his fists. Once again he was drawing people he cared about into harm’s way, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He swore silently to himself that he would do whatever it took to protect each and every one of them. But the promise felt empty even as it crossed his consciousness. He was a deteriorating mess and could barely keep himself safe. So he made himself another promise, one that even his failing physical and mental condition could not prevent him from keeping.
When this is over, I will never place my friends and family in harm’s way again.
PART TWO
It’s the promise of death that inspires a man to greatness.
Chapter 16
Yóulóng Village, Fujian Province
FRANCESCA STRUGGLED to break through the fog of a heavy sleep. Her eyelids were crusted together, and she had to arch her brow to snap them free. She squinted as she adjusted to the brightness of the room. She rolled her head to one side and saw a blurred figure approaching. She blinked to bring him into focus.
“T-Tony?”
“Go slow,” he said, the deep timbre of his voice like a salve, his broad shoulders and warm smile calming her nerves. He laid a hand on her brow. “It’s going to take a while for the drug to wear off.”
“Drug?” she said. Her eyes darted past him to take in the modest furnishings in the room—two additional beds, both made; a dresser; mirror; wardrobe; and a door leading to a hallway. The air tasted humid. “What drug? Where am I?” She rolled to one side, pushed herself to a seated position, and her vision swam. “Ohhh...” she groaned. Tony grabbed her arms to steady her.
“It’ll pass. Take a few deep breaths.” He turned and spoke toward the doorway. “She’s awake.”
The two men who strode into the room added to her confusion.
“There’s a sight for sore eyes,” Becker said in an Australian accent. His dark skin, blond hair, and sparkling blue eyes spoke to his mixed aboriginal heritage.
“No worries, ma’am,” the twentysomething Aussie next to him said. “You’ll be apples before you know it.”
“Beck? Jonesy?” she said, her bewilderment mounting. All three of the men appeared haggard, sporting two-day beards—at least. The Aussies were both dressed in the camouflage uniforms of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, while Tony looked like he was ready to go to a baseball game in a polo shirt, cargo shorts, and sneakers.
“Are the children here?”
“Steady, love,” Becker said. “It’s just the four of us for now.”
Jonesy motioned toward the empty beds. “Though it looks like our hosts had been expecting more company.”
“There are thirteen beds in all,” Tony said. “We figure this here’s the girls’ room. Us guys woke up across the hall in bunks.”
She shook her head and pushed to her feet. Her muscles were stiff and her head throbbed, but she was able to steady herself. She slipped into her sandals, smoothed her wrinkled peasant dress, and licked her lips. “Water?”
Ten minutes later her head had cleared, but her mind still rattled. They were in a rustic gathering room that included a kitchen, dining nook, and lounge area. Sunlight from two large skylights brightened the space. The three men sat around the dining table, watching as she peeked through the cracks in the shuttered windows, which had iron bars on the outside. She looked both ways to see rows of d
ensely packed hovels and shops, the upswept corners of the structures clearly identifying them as Chinese. A weathered man pushed a fish cart along the sodden earthen road, and a trio of barefoot women in peasant clothes and coolie hats nodded as he rolled by. A pack of children ran past, chasing a soccer ball. They glanced casually at the two armed men standing guard outside the door to where Francesca and the others were. The scene was backdropped by a towering jungle landscape.
She shook her head and returned to her chair at the table. The water bottle in front of her was empty, but the steaming bowl of soup Jonesy had poured for her was untouched. The men’s empty bowls were stacked to one side, along with the plastic spoons used to consume it.
“It’s mighty tasty, love,” Becker said. “And it’ll do you some good. We found it simmering on the stove when we woke up.”
She pushed the bowl aside and rubbed the bruised puncture marks inside her elbow. Eating was the last thing on her mind. “Let me get this straight. We were drugged, brought halfway across the world to a godforsaken village somewhere in China, and woke to a steaming pot of soup in a house with enough beds to accommodate everyone on the emergency list?”
“That’s our best guess,” Tony said. “Three beds in the girls’ room, for you, Lacey, and Sarafina.”
Becker added, “And five bunks for the three of us, plus Jake, Marshall, Cal, Kenny, Tim, and your two boys.”
“And we were all grabbed at the same time?” she asked.
“Within seconds of receiving your warning text,” Jonesy said. “It didn’t do me much good since it was four in the morning and it roused me from a dead sleep. Next thing I know I was nailed by a hypo gun.”
Becker rubbed his neck. “With enough juice to lay down a rhino. Caught me napping as well. We were in the field on maneuvers.”
Tony said, “It was one in the afternoon in California. I was leaving the hardware store, heading around to the rear parking lot when they jumped me. There were four of ’em, two of which are likely sporting full-body casts by now. I’d laid out the third one when a hypo took me down.” He took her hand. “I figure it’s thanks to your quick thinking that the others aren’t here. They must’ve received your text and followed procedures.”
Brainrush 05 - Everlast 02: Ephemeral Page 9