by David Archer
“Then we can figure some of the people she sees are bodyguards,” Sam said, “and armed. He’s going to be weak and vulnerable; he’s gonna want people there to make sure he isn’t killed or arrested.”
“Seems to me,” Indie cut in, “this would be the ideal time for some of his blackmail victims to free themselves from him. I mean, his whole mystique has been that no one knew who he was, but all these people would know. Do you think he’s actually got people who are really loyal to him? The way he forces people to do things, I’d think they’d want to kill him while they could.”
“He probably didn’t let anyone know this is him,” Joel said. “All he’d have to do is order people to see that his good friend Chang gets this operation, and tell them that he’ll be watching to make sure nothing goes wrong. Or he might have already set something in motion to kill their families, or some other innocent parties, if he doesn’t stop it in time, something like that. Either way, they’re gonna do all they can to make sure he wakes up safe and sound.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Indie said. “Anyway, now you know where he is. Sam, be careful, please? He might have a small army hidden close by there somewhere that I haven’t seen.”
“I’ll be careful, baby, don’t worry. We’re on the way there now.” He told her he loved her and hung up.
“Can we get there before Daphne does?” he asked Joel.
“Yes, by at least ten minutes or more. Go ahead and follow Sixteenth to 80 and get on, going east, and then go south on 880.” He opened his eyes and looked at Sam. “Do you really think he might have a small army?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said, “but I’m calling in reinforcements, just in case.”
He dialed George Albertson’s number and was rewarded with a sleepy, “H’lo?”
“George, it’s Sam Prichard. We know where he is, and we’re moving that way now. He may have armed bodyguards in place. Can you call in some backup without it going over the police radio?”
“Just tell me where,” Albertson said, suddenly wide awake. “I can bring a dozen or more without even calling it in.”
“East Bay Medical Center, Alameda Island. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” He looked at Joel. “Staging area?”
“There’s a 7-11 six blocks away, on Webster Street,” Joel said. “Webster and Lincoln.”
“George, there’s a 7-11 at Webster and Lincoln. We can stage from there.”
“I’ll be there,” Albertson said. “No problem. Don’t start without us, okay?”
Sam ended the call and put the phone away, then focused on driving. Joel called off Daphne’s location every few minutes, confirming that she was headed in the same direction they were, and Sam started to feel the adrenaline pumping.
It was always like this just before he went into a bust, and he’d missed that feeling for a while. In his normal PI work, he didn’t have the backup and camaraderie of a team; he’d had to do almost everything on his own, most of the time, and it had sometimes felt like the loneliest job in the world. Right at that moment, he was glad he’d finally accepted Ron’s offer. Now, all he had to do was catch the bad guy, save the day, and stay alive, all at the same time.
He made it across the bridge and took the 880 exit, then listened closely for the directions Joel was giving him as they closed in on the location of the medical center that seemed to be their destination.
It took another fifteen minutes to make it to the 7-11 store, and they were surprised to find two detectives from the local police department waiting for them.
“You’re Prichard?” asked one of them. “I’m Sergeant Juan Delgado, Alameda PD. This is Sergeant Anna Hemphill. Inspector Albertson for San Fran asked us to be here to assist. You really think you’ve got a lead on Yue Fei?”
“We’ve got one,” Sam said, showing his ID, including the DHS endorsement. “How solid it turns out to be remains to be seen. We’re anticipating confirmation within a few minutes, and then we can move in. You need to be aware that we’re expecting armed resistance.”
He filled them in on the basics of the plan as they waited for Albertson and his backup. It was another ten minutes before they arrived, and Joel announced that Daphne was arriving only a few seconds later.
Alberston brought along another dozen men and women, most of them plainclothes inspectors. There were only four uniformed officers present. “Sam, thanks for calling,” Albertson said. “I had to scramble, but all of us are members of the joint triad task force for our area, so we can cross jurisdictional boundaries as long as we’re working together. We’re all ready, so give the word.”
“Okay, then it looks like we’re in the right spot. Joel, can you get any kind of idea how many people are inside the building?
“Give me a minute,” Joel said. “I’m switching to infrared and looking for heat signatures.” He brought the drone down to just above the building and scanned it for signs of life. It moved back and forth for a couple of minutes, and then he brought it back into the sky and over to where they were waiting. “I can’t get clear individual registers, but there’s a lot of body heat in there. At a guess, I’d say there’s at least thirty people inside the building, most of them gathered around what I figure must be the operating room. There are a couple of people at the front entrance, another pair at the back exit, and at least two in the ambulance area—or maybe that’s a loading dock, I’m not sure.”
Sergeant Delgado produced a tablet and called up a layout of the building. “We have these for almost every building in the city,” he said, “for times when we have to go in and want to know where all the doors and windows are. Here are the entrances and exits, and this is the loading area he’s talking about.” He indicated them on the display.
Working together, they laid out their plan of attack. Delgado would lead a group in through the front entrance, while Albertson would take another through the back. Sam would go with Albertson, but he sent Darren and Steve with Delgado. Jade would work with Sergeant Hemphill and Rob’s security men at the loading dock, and they would all enter as quickly as they could and converge on the operating room. Walter and Joel would remain with their vehicles and wait for the signal to come in.
“Okay, we need to get into position without being seen, if possible,” Sam said, “and then we all hit them at the same time, in exactly ten minutes from—now. Everyone ready?”
They were, they said, and each group took off at a steady jog through the alleys.
Albertson and Sam stayed side by side as they moved toward the back, while Delgado’s group moved in on the main entrance. The problem was that the front entrance didn’t offer much in the way of concealment, so they had to come up on the west side of the building and huddle against the wall until it was time to go. Delgado held a flash-bang grenade in his hand, ready to throw it at the main entrance when it was time to go. It would have enough concussion to take out the glass in the doors and hopefully disorient the men who were guarding it.
Jade and Sergeant Hemphill had to go around the back to reach the loading docks on the east side, but they made it without being spotted. Hemphill clicked the walkie-talkie she carried once to let the other police officers know that they were in position, and then kept an eye on her watch as she waited for the mark.
At the planned moment, Delgado threw the grenade, Sam and Albertson ran toward the back doors where another officer hit the knob with a sledge hammer, and a third officer used a pry bar to pop open the walk-in door beside the loading dock. The men inside the front entrance screamed and went down, which drew the attention of the others, and the invading officers met almost no resistance at all.
Sam and Albertson had their guns aimed at the men at the back door before they even realized the door had been breached, and they laid their weapons down without a fight. Jade saw one of the men at the docks try to level his gun at Hemphill and fired once, striking him in the shoulder and making him fall back, dropping his weapon. The other man dropped his gun and raised his hands,
and officers moved in to take them down and cuff them. Each team left one man to watch the prisoners, and the rest moved in toward the operating room at the center of the building.
“Be ready,” Sam called out. “According to Joel, the majority of the triad soldiers will be right around Chang, trying to protect him. Don’t risk hitting Dr. Hu, and try not to harm any of the other medical staff; they’re probably all being blackmailed into this stuff, and may be innocent.”
They converged on the area at around the same moment, and Sam was the first one through the solid doors that led to the surgical area of the facility. He went through fast and low, while Delgado came in high, and they called clear only a moment later. The rest of the team and officers flooded in, and it took them only a few seconds to realize that the surgical area was empty.
“Where the hell are they?” Albertson yelled, and he was echoed by several of the other cops. Together, they fanned out and seached through the entire building, but only the guards at the doors were found.
Sam stared around himself in disbelief. “They were here,” he said. “Indie saw them, and Joel said the heat signatures indicated they were all in this area.” He glanced up and saw a camera pointing down at him and took out his phone.
“Indie?” he said as she answered. “Can you see me?” He waved at the camera. “I’m inside the East Bay facility, and waving at one of the cameras now.”
“You’re what? Sam, I don’t see you on any of them. There’s that guy Chang, standing there talking to that doctor and a nurse, and I see a bunch of Asian gang-banger types,” She paused for a moment, and then came back. “Oh, Sam, it’s got to be a relay feed. What I’m seeing isn’t coming from those cameras, but from somewhere else and routed through their servers. Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry...”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’ll call you back soon.” He cut her off and looked at the men and women around him. “Chang outsmarted us. This has been a wild goose chase, to distract us while he ferrets Dr. Hu off to somewhere else!”
“But where?” Albertson asked. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Let’s have our prisoners taken in, and get back to Joel and Walter. Maybe between the two of them, they might come up with an idea of where to look.”
Local officers arrived only seconds later to take the prisoners, and Sergeant Hemphill was sent along to make their report. Sam and the rest headed back to the 7-11 as quickly as they could, though Sam slowed them down a bit. The jog to the clinic had put a strain on his bad hip, and it was complaining loudly.
They got to the convenience store a few minutes later, and the look on Albertson’s face was grim. He’d run on ahead to ask if either of the men had any ideas, and he looked at Sam with a dark face.
“Walter is unconscious,” he said, “like he was knocked over the head—and Joel is gone.”
36
The red sedan pulled onto the interstate and merged into traffic smoothly. The driver kept his eyes on the road ahead, and ignored the voices from the back seat.
“It was you,” Daphne said. “All along, it has been you pulling the strings on this Chang. He has only been your puppet, am I correct?”
“Yes,” Joel said. “In more ways than you can imagine. And now you’re going to go ahead and implant the gen-5 into me, and I can do so much more.”
Joel had sent the message seconds after Sam and everyone else had left for the clinic, and the red sedan arrived less than a minute later. The entire route to East Bay Medical had been carefully planned to let him put Daphne Hu exactly where he wanted her. As it pulled in, Joel had leaned into the car where Walter was sitting and struck him with a bag of lead shot, knocking him senseless instantly.
A second later, he was opening the door and climbing into the back beside Daphne. She had asked him if something had gone wrong, but he only put a finger to his lips for a moment, reached over and took herself all and then told the driver to head for San Jose.
“I cannot do that,” Daphne said. “To do so would turn you into a greater monster than you already are.”
“Actually,” Joel said, “what it’s going to do is make it possible for me to save the world. Dr. Hu, take a look around yourself; our world is turning into a madhouse, with madmen running so many countries that it’s a miracle we haven’t already been destroyed by nuclear war. The only hope we’ve got is to put someone in control who can see the big picture, who can predict accurately what will happen with every major global event that takes place.”
Daphne stared at him. “But you are talking about trying to make yourself like a god. No one will stand for that, they will hunt you down and kill you.”
“Man always tries to kill off his gods,” Joel said, “but have you noticed that they never achieve it? With the gen-5, I become immortal. When my body begins to decline, I can copy myself a hundred times, a thousand times, and my consciousness will exist in computers all over the world. Anyone who tries to interfere will have to be eliminated, of course, because I can’t allow human weaknesses to keep the world on its suicidal path.”
Daphne scoffed. “Then you will have to find another surgeon. I will not do this, even if you kill me.”
“Oh, Dr. Hu, but you will.” He pointed at her cell phone, which suddenly chimed an incoming message. “Take a look at the reason why.”
Daphne lifted the phone and touched the message icon, and a series of photos opened up. Each photo showed her a number of children who were sitting in what looked like closed, concrete rooms, and in each one was a man with a machine gun.
She looked up at Joel, shock in her face. “You would not do this,” she said, but her voice sounded doubtful even to her own ears.
“I won’t,” Joel said. “The men holding those children have picked them up all over the Bay Area, more than four dozen of them in all. Each of them has one order; they are to wait until the day after tomorrow, and if they have not heard from me, they are to kill them all. If I contact them by that time, however, they will all be released unharmed. So, you see, it is now incumbent on you to make sure I can send that message, because if you don’t, then you will have killed them. Not me.”
Daphne stared at him. “And if I do not implant the chip,” she said slowly, “you will refuse to send it?”
“Okay, see, that’s where I’ve got you. It’s not that I would refuse to send it, it’s that it would be impossible for me to send it. The chip has an algorithm hardcoded into it, a way to positively identify it when it sends a command to a computer or an avatar device. The message can only be sent through the computer that was built to interface with that chip, which will look for that algorithm identifier. If it doesn’t find it, the command to send the message will be ignored and rejected, and then those children will all die. And the only way it can get the identifier is if the chip is active, and it can only be active if it’s implanted.”
“But surely,” Daphne said, “the computer was built by CerebroLink, and they will not let you use it for such a purpose.”
“Well, they probably wouldn’t, if they had the computer. Unfortunately for them, the one they’ve got is another one I built that looks the same but doesn’t have the algorithm. The right one is hidden in a server farm I set up three months ago, and there is absolutely no way anyone could find it in time.”
Calmly, Daphne looked at him and said, “You are a despicable creature, Mr. Streeter. I presume it was actually you who has been sending me messages?”
“Yep, through a cell phone that I set Chang up with. See, I’ve got everyone thinking he’s Yue Fei, the dragonhead of Cho Weh Wo, and to be fair, he sort of is. The only part they don’t know is that he doesn’t do anything on his own. Mr. Chang is, as you said, my puppet. I have absolute control over him at all times.”
“Because he fears what you will do to his loved ones? Or to some other innocent children?”
“Oh, no, it’s much simpler than that with him. See, Chang was so impressed with the first few experiments with me and my
chip that he started begging to get one of his own. Dr. Prentiss said no, because he was our top BCI engineer and we didn’t want to risk any brain damage to him, but I set it up for him to get another chip. See, there’s one that we developed for special purposes, one that allows a computer to actually take control of a human brain and its body. I let Chang think he was getting one like mine, but Dr. Williamson actually implanted the slave chip. And since I had already gotten the computer that was linked to that one stashed in my server farm, that meant that Chang was now only a puppet whenever I chose to take control.”
Daphne’s face was a mask of horror. “But you cannot be in control all the time,” she said. “Why did he not strike out at you when you slept, or when he was free of your control?”
Joel grinned, and Daphne thought it was a grin of pure evil. “He didn’t know,” he said. “When he isn’t under my control, I had him running off a program in the computer he was linked to. All of his thoughts, everything he says or does, is only what I allow into his brain, and as long as it’s coming through the computer, it never goes into his own memories at all. After the surgery, we told him the chip didn’t work and that we’d try again when there was another chip ready. He was disappointed, of course, but he trusted us. And then once he recovered, I started experimenting with him. I had the computer develop a program that could act like him in most situations, and then I took over whenever I needed to use him for my own purposes.”
Daphne looked out at the road. “And where are we now going?”
“To San Jose. I’ve purchased a small clinic there, and it’s got something we need. There is even a medical staff that will assist you, and every kind of equipment you could possibly need.”
She stared ahead and sighed. “I cannot allow those children to die,” she said. “I will perform your surgery, and then you may kill me. At least I will not need to live in the world with you as its false god.”
Joel laughed. “Oh, no, Dr. Hu, I’m not going to kill you. I’m not even going to allow anything to happen to you. You see, CerebroLink has done some incredible work in developing this chip, but I have quietly acquired controlling interest in other companies that have been working on these ideas. Three of them belong to me, now, and soon, they’ll be working on upgrades and improvements to the chip. If Fa Ling hadn’t doublecrossed me, they would have gotten the patent and the profits from its medical uses, but only I will ever have the full power the chip offers. I will need you to implant those upgrades as they become available, so I’m not going to let any harm befall you.” He laughed again. “Oh, no, Doctor, this is the beginning of a beautiful and life-long partnership.”