by J D Lasica
She remained silent. In the near darkness she couldn’t make out the faces of the surrogates in bed. Some were asleep while others seemed to stare off with a little blissed-out smile while hooked up to an IV drip. She didn’t see anyone who looked pregnant. These women must all be undergoing an early step in the IVF process, she figured .
Waterhouse made a sharp left and they made their way down a different aisle. They arrived at a bed with a small digital readout on the front: 274. This must be her!
“What’s her name?” Valerie asked, moving beside her.
Waterhouse picked up the electronic tablet at the foot of the bed and inspected the digital display. “Jamie Peterson.” He read from the tablet. “No anomalies. In perfect health.”
Valerie began stroking the girl’s long auburn hair with the back of her fingers. She had thought so long about her baby that she could never conjure up an image of her surrogate. But now here she was, this wonderful, giving young woman.
“She’s pretty,” she whispered to Waterhouse. “Maybe it’s the light in here, but she looks so young.”
“Young and healthy. We could have gone another way, but we wanted the best for you and your child.” He set down her medical tablet and began easing away from the bed as if signaling it was time to get going. “All right, we should let her rest.”
Jamie’s eyelids began to flutter.
“Oh, wait. I think she’s waking up!”
Waterhouse stopped in his tracks and turned. Is that a look of concern on his face? Or panic?
“Hi, sweetheart.” Valerie leaned close to her, brushing the hair from her forehead. “My name is Valerie.”
“Oh my God!” Jamie scooted backward to lift her head as high as she could raise it. She appeared to be … in restraints? “You’re not a doctor. You’ve come for me!”
Waterhouse grabbed Valerie by the wrist. “You’re upsetting her. We need to go—now .”
He tried to pull her away, but Valerie resisted.
“Get me out of here!” Jamie yelled.
Kaden aimed the nozzle and sprayed a hip-high rectangle on the glass door of the inside entrance in quick, even strokes, three feet across and two feet high. Then she repeated the process until the canister emptied. A small mist began to swirl as the liquid nitrogen went to work.
She waited a minute and then launched a powerful kick through the frozen outline on the door. Shards of glass went flying. She squeezed through the rough, jagged hole and entered the room followed by Sunshine.
It took her a few moments to get her bearings in the aura of the strange red glow. Through the dim light she could make out a dark figure in the distance raising his arm. Instinctively, she grabbed Sunshine’s back and propelled both of them to the ground.
The gunshot sent more of the frozen glass behind them shattering to the ground. Screams came from somewhere nearby.
They crouched behind a portable metal cart with a long tray on top. From across the room she heard Waterhouse bark, “Conrad! Why aren’t you answering me?”
She couldn’t make out much of anything around her. She spotted the glass windows high atop the walls and far from any beds. She turned to Sunshine. “We need light.” He smiled and nodded. She aimed her Twilight while Sunshine raised his Bravo Company semi-auto rifle with its thirty-round clip. They fired at the windows and everything opened up.
Sunlight flooded the room, and a startling clarity came to her. As she took in the scene, she grasped the enormity of what she was seeing. The room was immense, bigger than her high school gym back in Colorado, with mobile medical devices, privacy curtains, and portable lamps lined against the walls. Long white rows of beds spanned out in every direction—hundreds of beds—all of them occupied by girls or young women, from what she could make out. Some of the patients were tearing at their IV lines so they could hide beneath their beds. Others just lay there, drugged out or unable to move .
Her fingers found the top of Sunshine’s Bravo rifle, and she lowered the gun barrel to face the ground. Can’t endanger these civilians . I’ll need to take on Waterhouse by myself.
Kaden surprised herself with the decision she made in that moment. She rose with a fierce deliberateness, holding her Twilight firearm at her side. Around her, time seemed to slow. She locked eyes with Waterhouse on the far side of the room. He was grasping Valerie with one hand and holding a handgun in the other—it looked like a Walther PPK or a classic Makarov. She estimated the distance and the degree of difficulty of Waterhouse landing a direct hit from where he stood.
She saw Valerie free herself from Waterhouse’s hold and run off to the side for cover. She heard Waterhouse’s voice, saying something to Valerie, or maybe to her, or maybe to himself.
“This was necessary—for the greater good! … These were runaways. Street trash! … We cleaned them up, put them through detox. … They’ll be compensated!”
But it was all white noise. She took a step forward and checked to make sure the safety of her Twilight was released. Now, looking at the faces of the young women around her, she saw herself in their place, and she knew what she had to do. She used their pain, letting the misery of a thousand abuses wash over her. She channeled their anger, knowing that they chose none of this.
For this one fight, she would be their weapon.
She watched as Waterhouse took careful aim and steadied his shot. She made her body go small, turning sideways. Waterhouse fired. The bullet missed her, passing close enough that she imagined it grazing the fuzz on her earlobe.
Waterhouse saw her approaching and grabbed a girl with brown hair from the bed in front of him. He pointed his gun to her temple. “Stop, or I’ll shoot her!” he shouted.
She stopped. But she already saw in her mind’s eye what would happen next. She raised her Twilight and brought Waterhouse into her sights.
“Help me!” the girl yelled.
Waterhouse moved his gun from the girl’s head to aim it at Kaden. She peered down the length of her Twilight. She didn’t dare draw a breath for fear it would throw off her shot by an inch. The world went quiet.
She saw she had a good, clean shot. She squeezed the trigger.
She didn’t miss.
71
Dallas, August 31
K aden emerged from Building 32 into the brilliant Dallas afternoon. A small crowd was already gathering outside the exit on the stone patio. In the distance, at the entrance to the campus, she saw police cars begin to arrive with their sirens flashing.
Valerie wiped away a tear, came up to her, and hugged her tight. Someone touched Kaden’s shoulder from behind. It was the young brown-haired woman in her nightgown. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“Jamie, this is Kaden,” Valerie said.
Jamie wobbled a little. Kaden grasped her by the waist to support her, and Jamie turned it into a cheek-to-cheek hug.
“We were prisoners,” Jamie whispered into her ear.
Kaden grasped her hand to help her balance. “Why don’t you sit or lay down?”
Jamie righted herself. “I need to stand.”
Nico came up next to Kaden.
“It’s over,” she told him .
“So I heard.”
Kaden took stock of the scene. Sunshine was patrolling the perimeter to make sure Conrad’s security guards kept their distance. She saw Gregor Conrad laying on the ground at the edge of the patio, face up and not moving. Next to him were three of the guards Nico and Phantom had overpowered and tied up.
The authorities would sort out the crimes. But it would take time and perseverance for these women to deal with the emotional wreckage of what they’d been through. They might come to different decisions—but it was their decision, not anyone else’s.
For her part, Kaden knew she had some sorting out of her own to do. She’d never killed anyone before. There’s a solemnity to such an act, an accounting with the universe she would have to do. She expected an adrenaline rush or maybe a release of tension or sense of relief after sh
e pulled the trigger. But there was only a numbness that suffused every cell in her body.
“What now?” Jamie asked, still a little shaky.
“It’s time to heal,” Valerie said quietly as she noticed the top of Jamie’s nightgown had come undone and reached out to tie it like a mother might do. “Everything else can wait.”
Kaden smiled at that and Valerie returned the smile. She knew she would never have a normal family life. But she hoped she could form a special friendship with Valerie. She hoped she could come closer to the campfire and the circle of light.
She turned toward the entrance. One by one, other young women began to emerge from the building looking bedraggled and dazed but finding support and comfort from one another.
Score one for the survivors.
Characters
Here are the characters in Biohack :
Alan Tornquist : Chief legal counsel of Birthrights Unlimited
Alison and Paul Baker : Kaden’s adoptive parents
Alex Wyatt : Valerie Ramirez’s boyfriend and senior correspondent for the online news site Axom
Andrea Harkness : U.S. Army colonel and special advisor for new technologies with DARPA
Andrei Cazac: Runs the Pit, the company’s data operation in Moldova
Anton Bors : Programmer and data scraper at the data operation in Moldova
Bundt : One of Gregor Conrad’s key operatives
Contact : Kaden’s contact for her off-the-books freelance operations
Deirdre : Kaden’s biological mother
Dmitri Petrov : Head of Belarus-based investment group and first money in Birthrights Unlimited
Erica Landon : Senior genetic counselor at Birthrights Unlimited
Gregor Conrad : Security chief at Birthrights Unlimite d
Henry Lee : Chief Scientist and co-founder of Birthrights Unlimited
Jamie Peterson : Young woman rescued by Kaden
Kaden : Data specialist/hacker with special skills training who prefers not to use a last name. Or pronouns, for that matter.
Katarina Gorka : Sixteen-year-old instructor and recruiter at the Minsk Children’s Home
Lance Harrison : General manager of Bioinformatics at Birthrights Unlimited
Mackenzie Taylor : Surrogate at Birthrights Unlimited
Nico : Kaden’s soulmate, workmate and fellow graduate of the special ops training facility Lost Camp
Number Six : The artificial intelligence created at Birthrights Unlimited
Phantom : Operative, graduate of Lost Camp, and part of the “fearsome foursome” with Kaden, Nico, and Sunshine
Randolph Blackburn : Billionaire and main investor in Birthrights Unlimited
Sayeed, Annika , and Colin : Kaden and Nico’s fellow data operatives/hackers at B Collective in Brooklyn
Sharon Sullivan : Chief marketing officer of Birthrights Unlimited
Sophia Navitski : Ten-year-old student at the Minsk Children’s Home in Belarus
Sterling J. Waterhouse : CEO and co-founder of Birthrights Unlimited
Sunshine : Operative, graduate of Lost Camp, and part of the “fearsome foursome” with Kaden, Nico, and Phantom
Valerie Ramirez : Special ed teacher who lost her toddler in a swimming pool accident
Help an author out
If you enjoyed Biohack , please leave a review. Just one sentence and a rating makes a big difference in helping to bring the book to the attention of other readers.
Please take a moment to review Biohack on Amazon. I’d be enormously grateful! You’ll find it here:
bit.ly/biohackthriller
Hacked Celebrity Files
I hope you’ll join Kaden in her next adventure, Catch and Kill, Book 2 of The Shadow Operatives Series. Turn the page to begin reading.
You’ll get it at a special price if you join the Best of Indie Readers’ Circle below. You’ll also get free benefits and a copy of the secret documents hacked by Nico and Kaden.
Get it all here:
bit.ly/celebfiles
Book 2: Catch and Kill
Qaanaaq, Greenland, one year ago
The lone figure watched the private submarine rise from the depths, a craft that looked like a curvy concept car blended with a submerged rocket ship. He tightened the fur hood on his down parka and set off from the dock, nosing his one-man skiff through the bay’s biting cold.
As he drew closer, he saw two men fighting on the topside of the sub. A loud bang interrupted the purr of his outboard motor and echoed across the bay like the crack of a calving glacier. The target’s body slipped into the frigid waters with a muffled splash.
“Sorry you had to see that, sir.” Savić, his security chief, tucked away his snub-nosed revolver and held out his bearish paw to help his boss on board.
“All part of the deal.” Lucid’s breath formed a cloud. “Let’s leave the skiff and go below.”
They descended the hatch into the belly of the sleek private craft on loan from the Compact. “S’way,” Savić grunted. Lucid understood the shorthand for This way and followed his security chief forward to the bow .
As they entered the Observation Salon, a man dressed in a white uniform and officer’s cap shot to his feet, greeted him, and shook hands. “Honored to have you aboard. Captain Jan Kjellin, commanding officer.”
“The honor is mine,” the visitor said. “They call me Lucid.”
“Lucid. That’s clear as a bell, isn’t it?” The captain turned to Savić. “And the other fellow you were with?”
“He had to leave,” Savić said.
Lucid took in his surroundings. He had been on many cramped, godforsaken subs, but this room resembled a five-star hotel suite. Recessed lighting, leather sofas and seats, flat-screen TVs, and full bar. Instead of portholes, the room had four reinforced picture windows for a first-hand look at the arctic depths.
The captain moved toward the doorway. “Your chief scientist is down below.”
The captain guided Lucid and Savić down a carpeted hallway past a sleek dining room with pendant lights that swayed in unison as the sub began to move. Lucid captured video footage with his Eyecam as he stepped through the vessel.
They were out of Internet range and it would be impossible to live-stream the action for the Chairman. He felt an enormous sense of relief wash over him. Apart from sleeping, it was the first time in months he wasn’t always on .
The captain made small talk as he led them down a stairwell to the bottom deck. Lucid was pleased the captain didn’t seem to notice his artificial left eye—or was polite enough not to mention it. This model, version seven, appeared so lifelike that it often passed for the real thing. His Eyecam was already taking data readings. The exact geo coordinates of his location. The direction of true north. The amount of carbon, oxygen, and argon in the surrounding air.
“Here we are,” the captain said as they arrived at a small room marked Immersion Chamber. “I’ve been instructed to be accommodating—within reason. ”
Lucid and the captain entered while Savić remained outside. The room was bare except for the butter-yellow deep-sea probe glistening in the LED lighting, held in place by steel rods on a metal track. Lucid’s people had flown out to modify this next-generation bathyscaphe. It had a large oval window, protruding metal arms, and an array of “specimen catchers” in front—large titanium containers custom-tailored for the mission.
Two men were inside the probe arguing about something. Adam Bashir, their chief scientist, wagged his finger at a fair-haired submariner.
Bashir spotted him, opened the hatch, and climbed out. “Good to see you, Lucid.”
The crew member also exited the submersible and introduced himself. “Systems engineer Erikson, sir. I’ll be piloting the craft.”
Bashir ignored the young submariner. “I’m going alone.”
“Not happening.” Erickson looked adamant.
Bashir turned to Lucid for support. “This is unacceptable. Tell them.”
“Kaspari
an promised us secrecy,” Lucid said.
“And that you shall have,” the captain said. “I often accompany Erikson on these deep-water missions. It’s a two-man undertaking. But this is no standard geological expedition, is it?”
Lucid’s face gave away nothing, like the ancient rock formations on the seabed floor.
“Bit of a mystery, is it?” Erikson’s palm brushed the side of the probe. “If we’re going that deep, I need to know what we’re hunting.”
Lucid knew they’d get only one shot at this, and the Chairman would not accept failure. At the Lab, Bashir had mastered the computer simulation they’d created for the expedition. But Lucid knew how wrong things could go at the bottom of the ocean.
“Erickson will pilot,” Lucid decided. “Bashir will co-pilot and direct you to our target. The details of the hunt should not concern you.”
The captain pivoted to face the two outsiders. “Listen here. I’ve made over forty expeditions to the deepest, darkest cracks under the sea, from the Mariana Trench to the hydrothermal vents below the North Pole.”
Lucid tried to stop him. “You and your people are on a need-to-know—”
“I’ve seen stranger creatures than maybe any living man. Giant zombie worms. Dragonfish. Sea pigs. Spookfish that come up to you like wraiths of the abyss. Seadevil anglerfish that swum straight up from hell.”
The captain moved close to Lucid’s fake eye. “If there’s one person on board you need on your side, it’s the captain.”
Lucid considered this. If anything went wrong at the crushing depths they planned to explore, he would need the man’s full cooperation. He grabbed the captain by the shoulder. “Let’s step outside.”
They exited the chamber, walked past Savić, and huddled in a stairwell.
“I’ll read you in, Captain. But you need to keep this strictly under wraps. None of your men can know.”