Project Exodus (Biotech Wars Book 2)

by Justin Sloan

  “Yeah, and I’m starving.”

  “I’ll order Chinese. It’ll give me a chance to practice what I’ve been studying.”

  “Or you could order in English and not mess it up,” Prestige replied.

  Shrina laughed. “Hey, now. True, but not nice.”

  “You know I could just take care of it myself if you or grandpa would give me access to credits. I’m not a baby.”

  “I do know, and yet I kinda like this whole ‘big sister being in charge’ thing.”

  “Ha! Just don’t forget moo shu beef, okay?”

  “Promise.” With that, Shrina hung up and quickly pulled out her wrist computer. She hit order and watched as Chinese restaurants popped up, the system having pulled it from her call and making recommendations.

  She had just finished, including putting in the order for moo shu beef, when a message showed up—only, it didn’t make any sense. Something about Thanksgiving. Odd, since it was May and the holiday had lost is luster before the last big war. Now they celebrated All Appreciation Eve, which was pretty much still food-centered but had different associations. The thought of it took her mind back to Alicia, who’d always lamented the lack of Thanksgiving since the new holiday had replaced turkey with thick rib-eye steaks.

  “You have to be the only person in the whole world who’d rather have turkey than steak,” Shrina used to say, teasing her older sister, but Alicia had always stuck to her guns.

  After a second look at the message, Shrina began to have suspicions. Someone was screwing with her, and it wasn’t funny. Alicia was dead, dammit, and it wasn’t cool of this person to go around playing with her emotions.

  It was anonymous but from Japan. Odd that a message like this would come from so far away.

  “Who is this?” Shrina replied. She looked up and saw the train glimmering along the hypertube, heading toward the station, so kept walking, assuming she wouldn’t get a response.

  A moment later, the response came. “Just someone who misses turkey.”

  Shrina froze, staring at her screen.

  Another message came through. “If you agree, sending crypto now. Hope message received.”

  This threw Shrina for even more of a loop. Crypto was something that had been out of service for many years. Her building had an old crypto machine in the basement, but it was basically for emergencies. If everything else fell apart or was hacked, crypto would be the one way they could possibly get messages to their allies without being compromised.

  Whoever was trying to get hold of her, or mess with her, clearly knew about her old conversations with her sister. Problem was, as far as she knew, nobody else knew about those conversations. And if they didn’t, how would they know this would have struck a chord with her?

  The train was close, but her curiosity was too strong at this point. She had to know what the hell was going on, so she did an about-face and made straight back for the tall building she’d just left. The guards nodded her way, likely assuming she’d forgotten something.

  Nobody was around to give her a weird look, though, when she approached the basement instead of the secure door to her floor. When she reached the abandoned SCIF below, she was relieved to find that the code had been updated according to the briefing she’d received at the beginning of her shift that morning. Every day there were new codes, because they had to always be ready.

  She went into the vault-like room, turned on old florescent lights, and made her way to two tall stacks of crypto machines. This is so stupid, she told herself as she flipped the racks on, set them to incoming, and then fed a roll of paper into the machine to her right. Then she felt really stupid. Who used paper for anything anymore?

  And then she waited. After a few tense moments, a loud noise filled the room and the machine began to spit out paper—a long, thin strand but big enough to make out letters. And then the words, “Seven Face Bird.”

  Holy hell! She held the paper in front of her, hands shaking. Seven Face Bird. Shichimendo, or “turkey,” in Japanese. She’d nearly forgotten the day they learned that word and what it meant, joking about fake meanings and wondering if it was some sort of code word. But it was enough to go off of, and using it as a legend of sorts—as they’d joked around about so long ago in their simple way—the random letters and numbers were starting to make sense.

  The message read, “It’s Alicia. I’ll explain. So sorry.” And then coordinates.

  Shrina bit her lower lip, confused by the mixture of grief and excitement, hope and nausea, welling up in her. Her sister was dead. They all knew it. Only, they hadn’t been able to see the body, and part of Shrina had never truly accepted it. Her family said it was grief, that she needed to accept her big sister’s death in order to move on. She had tried, and failed.

  And now this.

  She took a deep breath, pulled up her wrist computer and checked the coordinates. Turkey. The snort of laughter that came from her would’ve been embarrassing if anyone else had been there. And if it had needed to be hit on the head any further, this was the last piece necessary to convince her that Alicia was behind this. Who else would be so corny, remembering such a minute detail and making such a big deal out of it?

  Switching the machine to send, she input the sender’s crypto location, then used the legend to say, “Coming ASAP.”

  If this wasn’t her sister, she needed to go and ensure someone got the whooping of a lifetime. If it was, well then, same story, only it would be her sister for not telling her she’d been alive this whole time.

  After quickly shredding the paper, Shrina exited the building a second time and headed for the train, glancing over her shoulder to see someone walking toward her. Or was she being paranoid? So far her work with the FBI had been focused on preparing for the SIA, without any real need for paranoia, but it was certainly possible that this odd occurrence was changing the way she looked at the world around her. If her sister was actually alive and trying to reach her, asking that they meet in Turkey, there had to be a damn good reason.

  No train was at the station yet since she’d missed the earlier one, so she stood there, waiting. At least she could get a good look at the potential follower, who turned out to be a woman. She didn’t recognize the woman, but that wasn’t surprising since she could hardly be expected to know everyone who worked in the large FBI building.

  The woman glanced her way and then back at her wrist device. If she were following her, she wasn’t very good at it. And for what? But then the woman looked at her again, put away her screen with a swipe of her hand, and started over toward her.

  “Still here, Shrin?” Cooper’s voice rang out, and she turned to see him and Reyes walking toward her, their shadows long in the orange light of the sinking sun.

  The woman walked past her, and Shrina turned to see the train approaching. She sighed, shook her head, and chuckled to herself.

  When Cooper and Reyes jogged over, she joined them on board the train and said, “Yup, barely missed the last one.”

  “Good,” Reyes said with a wink. “We can quiz each other on the way back.”

  She sat with them, glad for their company, and rode the whole way back with them. They took the same train, though her friends would transfer in Bethesda to ride the old metro lines to their homes.

  It was dark by the time Shrina reached her home, though she noticed that the woman from before had taken the same stop she did. After a couple of false turns, she was certain the woman wasn’t following her and saw no sign of her when she reached her grandparents’ house.

  She was glad to see that the Chinese food had arrived.

  “Sorry, we dug in without you,” Prestige said, glancing up from the glass dining table where she was watching one of her shows on her holographic screen, an earbud in one ear.

  “Grandma and Grandpa sleeping?” Shrina asked, glancing around the quaint house and not seeing any sign of them.

  “Went to watch some old timer’s show, that one about Mohira,” Prestige sai
d as she put a thin Chinese pancake on a plate with a big helping of plum sauce spread across it, then served up some of the toppings before sliding the plate over to an empty seat. “Get in here.”

  “Thanks,” Shrina said as she sat, folded her pancake, and took a bite. The mixture of sweet and savory made her nearly forget the long day and its strange end, but a glance at her younger sister reminded her what this trip would mean. “Something’s come up, for work. If I have to be away for a few days, you can handle yourself, right?”

  Prestige glanced up, her dark brown eyes lighting with excitement. “You’re going to leave credits, I assume?”

  “I can’t exactly rely on Grandma and Grandpa to feed you, can I?”

  “You mean it? All by myself? Well, kinda. Of course I’ll be fine.”

  “Don’t sound too eager now,” Shrina said with a laugh, then playfully hit her sister in the arm. “How about, ‘I’ll miss you, sis,’ or something?”

  “I will. But trust me, I’ll be fine.”

  Shrina smiled at her sister, nodding. She knew the girl could handle herself responsibly. Besides, she should be worried about herself. This trip needed to happen, and the only way she knew to make it happen was with FBI resources and using her badge in ways she wasn’t exactly authorized to. It was very possible she would be getting into big trouble for this.

  12

  Yokosuka Air Force Base

  Alicia couldn’t believe it. She’d actually received a response! And unless someone had intercepted her message and somehow figured out the legend that fast, it was from her sister, Shrina. They would be together soon, and all Alicia and Marick had to do was make it from Japan to Turkey.

  “Before I meet her, I have to ask,” Marick said, scrunching up his face, “do I know your sister and do we get along?”

  Alicia laughed. “Yes, and not very well. She kind of had a crush on you before you and I got together.”

  “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” she said and winked, then felt bad. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be having fun at your expense—not related to this memory gap stuff, anyway.”

  He raised an eyebrow in a ‘do you think?’ sort of way.

  “You two get along fine, if slightly awkwardly. She never told you about the crush, but you pretty much knew, and she knew you knew.”

  “Well that’s all very confusing,” he said with a shake of his head. “Wouldn’t it have been better to just not tell me?”

  She considered that, then said, “Nah, I don’t want to you seeing her looks and wondering if you two ever had an affair or something.”

  “I would never! I mean, I didn’t, right?”

  “God, no. You better not have or I’ll throw you to Nightshade myself. But no, I’m sure you didn’t. Trust and all that.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  Marick nodded to the doors and they moved out to meet Captain Yau, stationed there with the Air Force. It was an old base, one that had surprisingly stuck around while many others had closed. And luckily, one that still had its old SCIF and the crypto machine.

  “All set?” the captain asked. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen this boy.” He gave Marick a hard punch to the shoulder, though it didn’t do much.

  “Yes, now all we need is a good way to get out of here,” Marick said.

  “Before kicking back a few with your old pal?” Yau asked.

  “Sorry, it’s official business,” Alicia said, cutting in as she saw the confusion on Marick’s face. He was likely wondering how well he’d known this man. He already wondered if he’d been there before and had been surprised to find that the guard at the front gate had known his name. He’d been even more surprised when Yau started recognizing him with hugs and punches.

  “Married life,” Yau replied with a laugh. “Not for me, no sir. Wives, am I right?”

  He was still looking at her, so Alicia stared at him, confused, then shook her head. “Listen, Yau, can you point us in the right direction? Best way to get out of Japan?”

  “You just arrived, I’m telling you—”

  “And we’re telling you, buddy,” Marick interrupted, “we’re in trouble if we don’t get out of here undetected, and fast. Can you help?”

  “Oh? Damn,” Yau said and ran a hand through his thick, black hair, then nodded. “You got people watching for you, you aren’t gonna want to take to the skies. Too easy. Ship, maybe, but I’d say go with the crowds on the trains.”

  “What about surveillance and all that?” Alicia asked.

  “Sure, they have it. If whoever you’re worried about has access, they might pin you, but with the crowds in those stations? Unlikely, first of all. Even more unlikely they could get to you without mowing down hundreds of people. These aren’t the type who would do that, are they?”

  Marick and Alicia shared a worried glance, and he noted it.

  “I see…” Yau spun and held up his wrist computer, swiping his fingers across a screen that appeared above it, then made it move to the wall so they could all get a glimpse. “Here we are,” he said, pointing on the map that appeared. “Best bet, taxi to Shibuya, get to the trains there, and then catch one of the laser trains to the mainland.”

  “Laser trains?” Marick asked.

  Alicia grinned. “Oh, that’s gonna be fun. Never rode them last time, but I’ve heard it’s a rush.”

  Yau nodded. “Damn straight, it is. Talk about evolution. Those old bullet trains had nothing on these bad boys. Hyperloops and all that? Nothing.”

  “But won’t they be watching for that, too?” Alicia asked.

  He shrugged. “Might be, but with the crowds, you can make your way there and sneak on without them noticing, I’d imagine. Less wait time versus flying, and not as slow as the ships.”

  So it was decided, and soon Marick and Alicia were on their way, going by taxi in order to avoid dragging Yau into their mess. The last thing they wanted was for innocents to get hurt in all of this. Marick had folded his exo-skeleton into what was about the size of a suitcase, and Yao had given them a bag for their other gear.

  Traveling through Japan on their way back to Tokyo set off a barrage of memories in Alicia, not the least of them being the clear view of Mount Fuji in the distance. The morning sun rose in the opposite direction, casting a warm orange across the surrounding trees and the mountain itself. Thick clouds billowed in the distance, but the sky was otherwise clear. She reached out and took Marick’s hand, caressing the back of it as she remembered their trip to a traditional ryokan inn out there and the way they’d sat in their yukata, a full meal laid out before them with the view of a much closer Mount Fuji out the window. It had been the night before they climbed the mountain, an event that ended up leaving them with the much less idyllic memories of being cold in the rain, standing in a long line of climbers, and reaching the top only to find more cold and clouds that blocked any chance of seeing a sunrise. She chuckled at that, thinking maybe that was a memory Marick was better off without.

  Not the ryokan though. It pained her to know he wasn’t looking out and having that same memory. Then again, how often in life did she remember everything that had ever happened? He was still the same man whether they were able to get his memories back or not.

  Soon the view was blocked by buildings and the taxi driver told them they were in Tokyo, but Shibuya was a ways off still.

  Alicia leaned into Marick and rested her head on his shoulder, whispering, “We’re in Japan, and I know a guy.”

  “A guy?” he said as he stared out the window, watching it all with fascination.

  “A friend of my dad… into biotechnological research, now that I think about it. Maybe…”

  Marick put an arm around her. “You think he could see what’s wrong with me?”

  “I think we can ask him. See if there’s a way to get your memories back.”

  “First there, then the station?”

  She nodded, then leaned up to the driver. “Change of plans. Shi
njuku first.”

  He nodded and changed the route in his system, and before long they were speeding past a barrage of neon lights and billboard screens with men and women in exotic outfits, smiling and flashing canned coffee and more. The buildings were taller and brighter than those in most of Tokyo. That’s how she knew it was Shinjuku, though most of the city had certainly changed over the years.

  “Where exactly will this guy be? And how can you be sure?” Marick asked in a whisper.

  “I know where he works, and…” she said as she pulled up her screen to show him an article about a man being interviewed about biotech research. There was a picture of the man, and another man stood to his right, slightly behind him.

  “Ichida Kazu?” Marick asked.

  She nodded. “Mr. Ichida, or Ichida-san, as I knew him. Found him in the directory first, and then this.”

  Marick nodded, looking from her screen to the matching building that loomed up ahead. “It’s our best bet, then.”

  They paid the cab driver with credits, along with a bit extra to let them out at the corner of the building, and then they were moving through the shadows of the early morning. There was no telling how much surveillance was in this city or how connected their enemies were to it.

  Stepping into the lobby, they asked at the reception desk for Mr. Ichida, Alicia explaining that he was a friend of her father’s. A man had already picked up the phone to check, but when Alicia said her maiden name, he repeated it and immediately hung up, then bowed.

  “You may go up. Fifteenth floor.”

  She bowed in return and thanked him, and he didn’t even look up when they made their way to the elevators, setting off the metal detectors in the process. She hesitated, but if he wasn’t going to say anything, she wasn’t going to worry about it. While they waited, she couldn’t help noticing the way Marick was staring at her.

  “My dad was a big name in this industry,” she explained.

  “I see.”

  She laughed, shaking her head as the elevator dinged open and they stepped in. “If he could see what’s been accomplished, well, first of all he wouldn’t believe it. Second, he’d crap his pants with excitement.”