Dangerous Minds: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book One

by Xander Weaver

  “Fine. Let’s go.”

  It took only a moment for the driver to open the lab’s outer door by swiping his access card at the panel. A moment later they were inside the airlock. It was essentially a wide hallway that was maybe thirty feet long with another heavy door on the far end. The security window built into the wall to their right was impossible to miss; it was about four feet wide and three feet tall. But if the glass was as thick as the driver had claimed, William couldn’t tell it by looking.

  “Good morning, Frank,” the security guard on the other side of the glass said as soon as the driver stepped into the airlock. His welcoming smile disappeared, however, when he caught sight of the stranger.

  “What’s going on, Frank?” the guard asked. “I don’t have you down for having a guest on site today.”

  It was obvious that the security guard was already on alert. His eyes moved from William to his driver, Frank, and then back to William. He stepped closer to the control console that was located just beneath the window.

  “You better explain fast, Frank,” the guard warned. “You know the protocol here—you wrote it.”

  The guard had already flipped open the large plastic cage that housed a fist-sized red button. William realized instantly that the guard was about to purge the atmosphere from the room. “Hold on,” he said to the man.

  William stepped toward the window and raised a single placating hand as if the gesture would put the guard at ease. “There’s no need for that, friend,” he said.

  As William stepped forward, he met the guard’s eyes and focused his will on the area behind them. His breathing slowed and the world around him dropped from his conscious mind. All he could hear was the sound of his own heartbeat. The time between beats grew exponentially longer, the rhythm of his heart seeming to slow as he focused his will. In truth, it wasn’t his heart that had slowed but his grasp of reality as William focused every bit of his will into the singular effort to connect with the man on the other side of the glass.

  With a loud ‘pop’ that only William could hear, his senses snapped back to the present. A small smile turned up the corners of his lips as he looked at the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass. The guard stood stock still with his hand still poised over the large red switch that would seal their fate. There was a faraway look in the man’s eye that told William he had accomplished his goal.

  “What’s your name?” William asked him.

  “Sergeant Jason Wilks,” the man replied in a monotone voice that was very similar to the driver who had brought William into the facility.

  “Would you be so kind as to open the inner door for me, Sergeant,” William asked, his grin widening.

  The man nodded, closing the protective housing over the red button. Turning to a nearby control panel, he entered a ten-digit access code. The moment he was finished there was a sharp ‘hissing’ sound and the door at the far end of the airlock swung silently open on its hinges, entity of its own accord.

  “Sergeant Wilks?” William said, drawing the man’s attention back to the window. “We were never here. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  William led the way and passed through the airlock ahead of Frank. On the other side of the door, he found himself in an open common area with a small kitchenette to the left and a shallow breakroom with chairs and a television to the right. Frank pushed a button on the wall and the airlock door shut, sealing the way behind them.

  “How many men on your security detail?” William asked Frank.

  “Six men on the day shift, including the man in the screening booth,” Frank explained without hesitation.

  “Summon them for me. We need to prepare a proper welcome for my grandmother.”

  Chapter 16

  Mayflower Lab Facility

  Hennings, South Carolina

  10:16 a.m.

  Standing in the airlock entryway of the Mayflower underground laboratory, Cyrus was glad he’d left his weapon under the seat of the car when he parked in the underground garage. As he looked at the security guard on the other side of the bulletproof window, he knew that the man was reviewing MWS—Millimeter Wave Scans—of himself and Gertrude Waterford. The scanning hardware was hidden in the walls of the short corridor between the two airlock doors and was capable of detecting guns, even knives that were cleverly hidden on one’s person. The technology was similar to what was used in the screening processes at most major airports; however, Cyrus was familiar with the latest generation of cutting edge hardware being utilized in top private and government facilities.

  No one had mentioned the scanning technology, but it was the primary reason for the elaborate airlock mechanism that was essentially the last hurdle someone had to jump before entering the facility. Similarly, the guard on the other side of the glass was the last line of human defense. Up until this point, all security measures and counter measures had been automated. Cost effective in the long run, but no automated system was ever one hundred percent reliable. This was why a flesh–and-blood person manned the facility’s final barrier. Where technology might fail, a properly trained operative minding the gate was a wise last line of defense.

  “You’re clear, Missus Waterford,” the guard said from the other side of the glass. “Corporal Thoroe will meet you inside with the proper identification and credentials for your guest.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Wilks,” Gertrude said; her voice contained a rare warmth that surprised Cyrus.

  When the guard turned his head to meet Gertrude’s eye, Cyrus noticed the small black dot located behind the man’s left ear. It looked similar to the tiny patch that Gertrude wore.

  The second door to the airlock popped open with a ‘hiss’ and Gertrude led him into the next room. While Cyrus pretended to take in the small kitchen area to one side of the entry and the rec-room to the right, he was actually more concerned with Gertrude. He noticed that she was leaning more heavily on her cane than she had most days, and he wondered if the events of the previous afternoon and the subsequent late night had taken more of a toll on her than she let on.

  “Good morning, Missus Waterford.” A man dressed very much like the guard in the airlock emerged from the wide hallway that bisected the back wall of the rec-room.

  He offered Gertrude a brief smile before turning his attention to Cyrus. “I’m Corporal Tony Thoroe,” he said, shaking Cyrus’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Sir. I have your credentials here.” He handed Cyrus a sealed manila envelope. “Your biometrics are already on file so you’re all set.”

  “Thank you, Corporal,” Gertrude said in an apparent effort to truncate any further discussion. “We’ll be in the primary lab. Is anyone else inside the facility?”

  “Just the security staff, Ma’am. You have the facility to yourself today.”

  Gertrude offered a satisfied nod before motioning Cyrus in the direction of the wide hall from which the Corporal had emerged. She started off at a surprising clip. It seemed she was eager to get to the lab.

  They were fifty yards down the long hallway before Gertrude cast a sideways glance at Cyrus who was taking long strides to keep up with the woman’s quick pace. Though she was making efforts to appear like it was business as usual, there was no disguising the rapid ‘clank’ that resonated from her cane each time it struck the tile floor with every quick step. Cyrus could sense the tension radiating off her.

  “Tell me, Mister Cooper,” Gertrude said while sparing him a quick glance. Her full concentration was directed on maintaining a rapid pace. “Are you armed?”

  Cyrus offered a stoic, but reserved glance of his own. “As your assistant, that strikes me as…inappropriate.” His tone was purposefully noncommittal.

  She didn’t look back. “That wasn’t an answer.”

  “After what happened last night, it seemed like reasonable precaution,” he said after a few long beats. “But I didn’t figure it would fly with security, so I left my sidearm in the car. Why do you ask?”


  They turned a corner when the hallway reached a four way intersection. Gertrude led them to the right without a moment’s delay. Cyrus could tell that she was winded, but she had yet to slow her pace.

  “You’re a sharp young man,” she said. A wheezing sound entered her voice, but still she pressed on. “Since we’ve entered this facility, does anything strike you as out of place?”

  Stopping in front of a twenty-foot wide sliding steel door, Gertrude produced a keycard and swiped it across the plate on the wall beside a numeric keypad. A low buzz emanated from the panel indicating that her card had failed to register. Cyrus read the concern in the woman’s eyes.

  “Can I help you, Ma’am?” Another security guard dressed in the same desert camouflage fatigues arrived, startling them both.

  The pair of guards had appeared from out of nowhere.

  “Yes,” Gertrude said in a raspy, dry voice. “My card seems to have been damaged. I can’t seem to access my own lab, for God’s sake.”

  At first, Cyrus found it disconcerting that a pair of soldiers had managed to sneak up on him in the middle of the facility’s empty, wide open halls. Situational awareness was of critical importance in the field and absolutely crucial to survival when working undercover. He didn’t like the idea of these two men getting the drop on him.

  Those unpleasant feelings almost caused Cyrus to disregard the sharp look he saw in both men’s eyes as they stepped closer. Having just suffered a blow to his ego, it was easy to dismiss his tingling sixth sense as a momentary flash of paranoia. But as his eyes made an instantaneous scan of the surrounding hall prior to moving back to the guards, he realized what it was that had brought warning bells. The door to a janitor’s closet on the opposite side of the hall was slightly ajar, and he realized how the two guards had appeared so suddenly.

  There weren’t many reasons for a pair of guards to be hiding out in a janitorial closet just then, and Cyrus’s senses sprang to full alert.

  The first guard had only laid his hand on the gun strapped to his hip when Cyrus snapped out a right cross that demolished the man’s nose in a single crushing blow. The man stumbled backward on his heels as a geyser of blood spurted from his face.

  The second guard was awarded a second longer to react and managed to free his service pistol from the holster. He was just bringing it to bear when Cyrus locked the man’s gun wielding wrist in a vice-like grip and pushed it aside. At the same moment, he grabbed the man by the collar of his uniform with his free hand, jerking his upper body to the right while kicking the man’s legs out from under him in the opposite direction. It was a lightning fast move that left Cyrus in control of the man’s weapon, and the guard facedown on the tile floor with his arm wrenched violently behind his back.

  The first guard was crab walking backwards across the floor to gain distance from Cyrus. As soon as he was safely away, he tried once more to retrieve his sidearm. It was a tricky process with him disoriented from a blow that had left his eyes tearing. He sputtered and coughed as he choked on the blood running down the back of his throat from his crushed nose.

  The guard finally managed to pull his weapon free, and Cyrus had a split second to make a life or death decision. He didn’t know what was happening, but he’d just been attacked by a pair of United States Marines—Marines who were charged with the safety and security of a top secret installation.

  Switching his newly acquired gun to his right hand for better accuracy, Cyrus fired a single shot into the right shoulder of the man who was blindly raising a weapon against him. The violent impact of the round spun the man back to the floor. A clatter was heard as his gun went skittering off across the tile.

  Resting his knee on the back of the other guard and applying plenty of pressure to the arm he held wrenched behind the man’s back, Cyrus finally had a chance to look back at Gertrude. She’d watched the entire series of events with a shocked, slack-jawed expression. The entire assault had taken place in less than five seconds, and it was clear from the look on her face that she hadn’t been prepared for any of it.

  “What the hell’s going on here, Gertrude?” Cyrus asked in an angry voice.

  His words snapped her from her shocked, inactive state. She looked at him for half a breath before turning back to the keypad and striking her card against the plate once more. Once more, the card was rejected.

  “Something is very wrong here,” she replied without turning around. “I’ve been locked out of my own lab and, needless to say, this isn’t what these men are paid to do.”

  Frustrated, she tossed her swipe card aside and began punching buttons on the numeric keypad on the wall beside the door. Though Cyrus couldn’t see what she was doing, each time she hit a button on the pad it emitted a quiet beep. Whatever she was doing behind him, she was entering dozens of numeric codes.

  “Whatever you’re doing, make it quick,” Cyrus warned. “We need to get out of this hallway now.”

  “I’m working on it,” she muttered.

  A moment later there was a loud double ‘chirp’ followed by a pair of heavy ‘thunks’ that reverberated through the steel door. Cyrus looked back over his shoulder and saw the massive door to the lab begin to slide open on invisible tracks recessed into the concrete walls.

  Flipping the safety on his liberated gun, Cyrus smashed it over the head of the man on which he knelt. The other guard was just starting to pull himself up from the floor when he, too, was clubbed and rendered unconscious.

  Turning the guard with the gunshot wound over, Cyrus examined the injury. The man had taken the shot high in the shoulder, and as Cyrus hoped, he was wearing a vest. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the skin, but it had spun him and knocked the wind out of him.

  While he didn’t know what was going on, something was deadly wrong—Cyrus had felt it even before they had entered the depths of the facility. Had the security guards gone rogue, or was there something more happening here? While he wasn’t opposed to taking a life in defense of his mission’s objective, something about what was happening bothered him, and he felt suddenly reluctant to shoot down anyone until he knew more.

  Stepping across the threshold of the massive steel door, Cyrus nodded to Gertrude who stood at the control panel at the edge of the entry. She entered another code into the keypad and the door slid quickly shut behind them.

  The lights of the lab flickered on a moment after the door closed, and Cyrus looked at the surrounding laboratory. It was a single open room, maybe a hundred feet wide and twice as deep. There were three elaborate workstations positioned nearest the door at the front of the room. Each system was essentially a small pod that consisted of a large, sloping, ergonomic chair perched before a horseshoe-shaped countertop equipped with three 30-inch flat panel displays.

  Beyond the workstations were complex pieces of high end medical equipment, only some of which Cyrus recognized. There were MRI and CT scanning rigs, but they were highly customized compared to the ones he had seen in the Coalition’s infirmary.

  The lab also contained a pair of long medical tables, stainless steel with built-in drains. They were the same type of tables he’d seen in modern morgues and pathology labs. Along the back wall was a massive walk-in freezer with a door large enough to move in and out of while driving a small forklift.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, casting an irritated glance in Gertrude’s direction.

  Moving slowly across the lab, Gertrude pulled a rolling stool out from under one of the counters and lowered herself onto it. She was clearly in pain from the rapid pace she’d set moving through the complex.

  Just like she had following the attack at the corner market, Gertrude was taking this turn of events with a disturbing level of ease. Cyrus wondered what it would take to actually rattle the woman.

  “You were going to tell me what you found out of place upon entering the facility,” she reminded him.

  “I don’t know,” Cyrus said with a frustrated shrug. He slipped out of his suit coat and
draped it over one of the 30-inch computer displays. “This entire place just seems…off.”

  She shook her head. “You can do better than that. You’re quite an observant young man. Indulge me. I’m very interested in knowing what raised your hackles.”

  Cyrus let out an exasperated sigh. “What’s the small black dot behind your ear?” he asked, finally cutting through all pretenses.

  Gertrude’s hand went instantly to touch the small patch behind her ear as if she had forgotten it was there. She looked at him for several long moments, her expression a mix of what he could only guess was self-consciousness and indecision regarding the explanation.

  “Alright,” he said when her answer was not immediately forthcoming. “Whatever it is, I noticed that the guard at the gate wore a very similar patch. Not too unusual, but interesting. It made me wonder what it was all about. But once we came inside, I saw something in your eye when you noticed that Corporal Thoroe wasn’t wearing a patch. At that point you started to become agitated. You were playing it cool, but I knew something was wrong. I figured the patch was some kind of security precaution that wasn’t in place.

  “Then I started to notice the cameras throughout the facility; first in the rec-room, then in the hallways leading to your lab.”

  “What about them?” Gertrude asked, clearly concerned with the observation.

  “They were all offline. The wall-mounted cameras are from a company called X-Image Systems. The camera is the model A1. There’s a small red LED that stays lit in the corner of each, just below the lens. The LED indicates that the system is online, but it’s also a part of a sensor array that lets the camera read across multiple infrared and thermal modes. If there’s no light, then the cameras are offline. That doesn’t happen in a facility with security like this. Not unless someone did it intentionally.”

  Gertrude’s normally grey complexion somehow grew more ashen with that realization. “Then no one knows we’re here or what just happened?”