“What the hell was that all about?” She asked him.
“Oh. That. It’s a problem.”
“Do you know what happened to the man’s daughter?”
He considered the question carefully. “I’m afraid I do,” he said. “You know how I have my secret life with the tank. Well, there are others. Only these others don’t care about what we care about. They aren’t looking to the other side for answers. They’re only looking for power.”
“Like an evil sorcerer or something?”
“Something like that.”
She told him, “I guess that makes you one of the good ones. A white sorcerer.”
“Far from it,” argued Dade. “I practice neither black nor white magic. What I do is a technology that I use for my own individual purposes. I don’t strive to be a member of a club.”
“Do you know anything about who’s behind it?”
“It’s a group of some kind. It’s extremely rare to find a shaman powerful enough to do this all on his or her own.”
“Like the group I saw on my first day. They had a little boy floating in the air. There were maybe a dozen of them.”
He said, “Those are the suspects at the top of the list.”
“The woman in the woods,” remembered Ann Marie. “She said something about a man teaching them.”
That got Dade’s attention. “What did she say about him?” He asked with some insistence. “Did she call him by name?”
“No,” she said. “You ask that like you have someone in mind.”
“There’s someone that I hope it isn’t.”
“You’re scaring me,” Ann Marie told him. “The woman also said that he was going to teach me, whatever that means.”
Dade couldn’t hide his concern but he reassured her. “There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”
Chapter 5
The Camel Spider
Bander Al Zahrani stared at the ceiling tiles above his small, rickety cot. The grey light of morning was starting to sneak through the gaps in the wooden planks that boarded up the mosque windows. His head was spinning. He had no idea how he had ended up in the strange place. He wasn’t Muslim and this was his first time ever inside a mosque. The only reason he figured out it was a mosque was the Arabic writing and artwork on the walls. He was all by himself in the place, which had to have been abandoned for years.
He tried to figure out how he had arrived, but the effort just made his head throb. It took quite a bit of concentration to even grasp the syllables of his own name. Had someone drugged him? The last thing he remembered was talking to a pleasant older gentleman at the bar by his apartment. The man had a fedora hat and hummed some kind of old-sounding tune. That was all Bander could remember.
Suddenly, just outside one of the boarded-up windows, he heard what he thought sounded like rats scurrying around. The noise got scratchier and more intense as he focused on it. Then the scratching was everywhere. It sounded like an army of termites trying to chew its way inside. The strange noise climbed the walls around him and intensified.
Something was trying to break inside the mosque. It was ripping through one of the boards on the window by his cot. Just as the window became compromised, a ruby-red line of laser light scanned Bander like an item in the grocery store. Then all the wooden boards started dropping off the side of the mosque. Something was ripping them out by the nails.
The blinding morning sun came pouring in. Along with the sunlight, a blur of what looked like rat-sized black preying mantises started to fill the floor of the mosque. He thought that he might be hallucinating the metal scorpions but the Asylum Corporation drones were indeed all around him. Twenty or so of the little metal creatures linked arms and formed a chain. They wrapped up Bander like a spider’s meal.
He screamed, “No! Please! I didn’t do anything! I was just at a bar and woke up here!”
One of the DeathStalkers positioned itself by Bander’s ear and started playing an audio recording of the president of the United States. “You have been convicted of acts of domestic terrorism,” said the recording. “You have waived any right to a trial, contact with a lawyer or any investigation.”
“Please! I’m not a terrorist!” Bander shouted at the machines.
The recording went on, “The United States of America apologizes if you have been unfairly charged. However, there is no process for appeal. We apologize for any loss or inconvenience our error might cause. The Asylum Corporation assumes no liability in event of an error. Your country appreciates your commitment to freedom.”
“No!”
The drones put a black hood over his head and tied it snuggly around his neck. Another twenty or so little creatures lifted their quarry above their heads. Bander was taken out of the room like he was crowd surfing.
...
At the Asylum Laboratory, a motorcade of ten military vehicles pulled up to the front. A small platoon of soldiers exited and started to secure the area. The agent in charge told the Sheriff, who was waiting in front, “I need to speak with Dr. Harkenrider immediately.”
The agent had been sent by the Central Intelligence Agency to take charge of the interrogation of Bander Al Zahrani. The session was to take place in one of the laboratory’s special experimental interrogation facilities.
“The kid stays,” Dade said firmly to the commanding intelligence agent when they met in the secure conference room a few minutes later. Ann Marie even stood up and offered to leave, but her boss was quite insistent that she remain. “If you want me to cooperate and not get in the way of whatever plans you have,” he told the agent, “the kid stays.”
“Dr. Harkenrider,” the agent explained, “the young lady doesn’t have sufficient security clearance and this is most improper.”
“She’s a god damned scientist,” Harkenrider said. “She’s more qualified to know what’s going on than you are. Besides, you want to use MY experimental interrogation room in MY lab, then you’re going to have to stop pretending that we care about your rules.”
“I was told that you are prone to being difficult,” the agent said, “but I’ve been instructed to do what’s necessary to gain your full cooperation. As long as this isn’t being recorded, I will make an off-the-record exception to facilitate things.”
Dade smiled at Ann Marie to demonstrate his small victory.
The agent unlocked his steel briefcase with his thumbprint and took out a photograph of captured Bander Al Zahrani. It looked as though he had been banged up quite a bit during capture. His left eye had nearly welted over from the beating. Most of his beard and hair had been ripped out of his skin.
“Nice job, morons,” Harkenrider said, noticing the man’s beating. “His brain needs to work if he’s gonna be interrogated. I hope he still remembers his own name.”
“The Camel Spider, we call him,” said the agent. “We haven’t been able to extract any information of quality from the man. His personality is just too strong. We’ve water-boarded him, tried electroshock to the balls. We’ve already tortured and killed his entire family and the man still won’t budge. He is a true believer, apparently.”
Ann Marie felt sick to her stomach and turned away from the photos.
The agent continued, saying, “I believe we have no other choice than the pharmacological techniques you’ve helped pioneer. The techniques created here have their skeptics but this man won’t break any other way, I’m afraid.”
“I will conduct the interrogation,” Harkenrider said. “No further convincing is required.”
“There must be some misunderstanding, Doctor. We already have someone else in mind.”
“You came here for my help. I’ve agreed to give it to you. I don’t see any misunderstanding.”
“Doctor,” the agent started to say with care, “we have someone very experienced to perform the interrogation. Your help with that won’t be necessary.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Dade stood up in indignation. “Who? What man? Who is going to come in here and use MY facility?”
“Dr. Harkenrider, please sit down. I’m afraid the who involved here is the real crux of the problem. The agency realizes that there may be some personal history but we ask that you put this behind you for the sake of national security.”
“What man are you talking about?”
“We simply ask that you do not interfere with the man. Please give him space to do his job and perhaps some assistance in the laboratory with the chemical agents.”
The idea of assisting anyone in his own laboratory broke what composure Harkenrider had left. He sat back down, started laughing and threw his head back in his chair. “You must be out of your minds over there in DC. You really thought I would comply with this nonsense?”
“Bernard Mengel,” fell out of the agent’s mouth.
Dade Harkenrider’s face became a still snapshot, a mixture of astonishment and rage. He suddenly gave the agent his full and undivided attention. The blood seemed to run out of his face as his mind swirled and calculated. His voice turned to a hybrid of a whisper and a growl. “Bernard Mengel,” he repeated.
“I’ve come here to ask that you allow Dr. Mengel to perform this very important interrogation without any harassment. We understand that you have had some differences with the man and you even made an attempt on his life several years ago. If you could put these differences behind you, albeit temporarily, your laboratory could rewarded with sizable funding for your cooperation.”
“You’re going to pay me to not attack Bernard Mengel?”
“We’ve been trying to catch the Camel Spider for ten years now. He is the key to an entire terrorist network and a grave threat to America. You would be doing a great service to your country.”
“I don’t have a country.”
“Dr. Harkenrider,” the agent started to plead, “this man knows the location of a dirty bomb and his people are going to set it off just down the road in Los Angeles.”
“Let me interrogate him.”
“I’m sorry but Dr. Mengel has forty years of experience in this sort of thing.”
“He is just going to use it as an opportunity to invent new torture,” Dade argued. “You don’t know him the way I do. You won’t get anything of any use.”
“Well, we will have you and your pharmacopeia ready in case he fails. You can be his understudy of sorts.”
“Understudy?”
Ann Marie expected Dade Harkenrider to throw the man out of the building for using that particular term but her mentor looked as though he saw some merit in the plan. He smiled and repeated, “Understudy. I suppose we can make some arrangement.”
...
After the meeting with the agent, Dade disappeared to his personal laboratory. Ann Marie found him up there while he was flipping through a stack of what looked like classified documents destined for the burn bag. When she got closer, she could tell the entire stack was dedicated to Doctor Bernard Mengel.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Please stay away from that man,” Dade said to her in a manner that was almost pleading.
“Do you mean the terrorist, The Camel Spider?”
“The terrorist is harmless now but no man on Earth is more dangerous than Bernard Mengel.”
Ann Marie giggled at the warning. She said, “He looks like a sweet old grandpa in the photographs.”
Instead of arguing with her, Dade simply displayed a look that suggested she was beyond foolish. “Don’t ever be alone with him. Don’t listen to him. Don’t speak to him. Stay around people. Stay near me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What would he do?”
“Please be careful,” he said. “If he’s around, stay close to me.”
“But, why?” Her voice was pleading for some sort of hint.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“How do you know?”
“You aren’t ready to know and trust me, you don’t want to.”
Ann Marie became more insistent. “When will I be ready to know?”
“I’m not ready to know.”
Suddenly Ann Marie got an idea and a mischievous smile showed itself on her face. She said, “I would probably be more careful around him if I knew a little more about the threat. He just seems like a little old man to me and I don’t find myself scared of him at all. I want to stay away from him like you’re saying but you aren’t giving me enough of a reason.”
“You see,” Dade told her, “this is why I don’t care for humans. It’s the constant games. I’m trying to keep you away from a serious threat and you are trying to twist me into giving you information using your own safety as leverage. Very peculiar behavior if you ask me.”
“Please just tell me something about what’s going on here.”
“Fine,” he answered. “The world isn’t what it seems.”
“You’re not answering me. Why should I stay away from Bernard Mengel? Is he a killer or something?”
Dade Harkenrider nearly laughed at the word: killer. “He’s much worse than any killer.” Then he added, “I was thinking that maybe you should come in a little late tomorrow. After the interrogation is over. Or maybe just take the day off.”
Ann Marie could tell that he was hiding something. The request to come in late felt like a serious warning. He also had the look on his face that she was beginning to identify as protective. She said, “That agent mentioned you tried to attack Bernard Mengel years ago. Why?”
“Because I wanted to kill him.”
“What did he ever do to you?”
Harkenrider started to put away the documents relating to Bernard Mengel. He looked at Ann Marie in a way that meant that the topic was closed until further notice. He started for the laboratory door, saying, “You may want to head for home soon. The marine layer is moving in and visibility on the hill will be down to nothing.” Then he turned back to her on his way out of the door. “I’m encouraging you to take the day off tomorrow,” he told her. “If you do decide to work, remember to come in late tomorrow. I don’t want to see you before ten.”
...
The next morning, Ann Marie ignored Harkenrider’s request and showed up to the entrance of the laboratory twenty minutes earlier than usual. It was well before nine when she pulled up the hill. When she reached the guard booth, the turnpike was down and she brought her car to a halt at the gate.
When the Sheriff saw her face, he looked nervous and signaled for her to wait. This had never happened once during her employment at the corporation. He got on the phone and when he received his orders, he nodded in compliance to the other party on the line. He hung up and came over to Ann Marie’s car.
“Looks like you’ll have to wait a few minutes, kid,” he said. She asked him why somewhat insistently. He told her that Dr. Harkenrider had asked that she not be admitted until additional word was handed down.
“This is ridiculous,” she argued. “I’m a principal scientist here.”
“I’m sorry, kid,” The Sheriff said as though he regretted holding her at the checkpoint. “I got my orders. Came down straight from the boss.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said it wasn’t safe for you with the prisoner around.”
“The prisoner is wearing seventy-five pounds of shackles and a black sack over his head. I don’t think he’s going to get me.”
“The boss seemed real concerned. He said that, even though he told you not to, you would probably try to get here before ten and that I should hold you at the gate. I’m sorry, honey.”
A black SUV filled with gov
ernment people and military police pulled up behind Ann Marie. The driver, who was wearing a suit and dark sunglasses, signaled to let them though.
“I’m sorry, Ann Marie,” the Sheriff said. “Would you mind moving over there and letting these guys pull around you?”
“I definitely mind,” she said. “Why should they be allowed through? They don’t even work here. I’m a principal scientist here and my badge is supposed to get me into all areas.”
“I’m really sorry,” said the Sheriff, “but the boss has given me my orders. Would you please just pull over there and let these guys through?” Behind Ann Marie, the driver of the black SUV beeped his horn in impatience. “I’m gonna need you to pull over there, Ann Marie. These government guys mean business.”
“Fine,” she said as though her will had been broken.
Ann Marie moved her car out of the way and the black SUV pulled up to the turnpike. As the gate came up, she hit the gas and took the lead in front of them. The black truck filled with plain-clothed military personnel stopped just short of hitting her car.
The Sheriff wasn’t sure if he should hit the alarm and after deliberating for a few moments, he dialed Dr. Harkenrider saying only, “I’m sorry, Dade. She’s coming up now.”
As Ann Marie’s car pulled up to the laboratory, her phone rang. When she answered, Harkenrider asked her, “When I told you to come in after ten, which word didn’t you understand?”
“Why can’t I be here? Don’t you trust me? Aren’t I a real scientist here?”
“Of course you’re a real scientist and of course I trust you. That isn’t the issue,” Dade told her. Through the phone, he sounded like he was caught in a windstorm.
“Where are you? It sounds windy.”
“Will you please just listen to me when it comes to this one simple thing and stay with the Sheriff until this is over?”
“Then you need to tell me what’s going on and why it’s so important that I not be there.”
“Oh forget it,” Dade said as he hung up.
Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Page 7