“Him I like. He didn’t make any pretenses about crass American commercialism.”
“Something tells me you’re about to get pretty crass inside that boardroom when it comes to commercial warfare,” she said.
“Touché.”
They were walking down the Andy Warhol corridor now. The hall was pretty wide. He guessed it had to be to appreciate canvases this large.
She led him into a conference room where the corporate titans, gathered up from their respective floors in the building, awaited him.
He took his seat and waited politely for the secretary to leave, though he was certain she had more secrets stored in her head pertaining to national security than the wall mikes in the oval office.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Adrian led off with, “without getting into too much detail, I need access to some hotshot weapons that will tilt the scales in my favor. Weapons easily concealed. But unlike James Bond, I won’t be pumping lead out of a Walther PPK. I need something a little more lethal than that. I was thinking more like a pocket nuke.”
Not one person laughed. Just some craning heads. When they were finished shooting vague looks at one another, they looked back at him. “And why should we help you?” one of them said.
“Because this is a one-man mission. I’m the man. And I only get one shot with the target, who just happens to be carrying a planet-killer in his pocket. If the vial he has on him breaks, we’re talking a pandemic we’ll never be able to contain in time. I’m the only one with any chance of getting close. And for the record, I don’t much care if I and anyone else in the room or the building is incinerated right along with him. That’s what I’m willing to do for you. What are you willing to do for me?” He couldn’t tell them the truth. Because then they’d be hunting for the unkillable man. He had to tell them something compelling enough to solicit their help though. And he figured that story he just laid on them should do the trick.
No response. Just more heads craning to one another with expressions and beady eyes suggesting what was concealed behind their masked faces could fill the library of congress a few times over. Finally they twisted their necks back to him. Another one of the Borg collective said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you.”
A tinkling of glass.
Adrian thought someone was swirling a scotch on ice. Then he realized no one was drinking. He panned his head to the window and there was the tiniest of holes, surrounded by a feathering of cracks. Adrian bit down on his jaw hard enough to strain the muscles at the back of his teeth.
He returned his attention to the group.
The tinkling glass sounds continued, faint in the background. They were easily overlooked in the comparatively louder squeaking and grinding sounds the chairs made with people shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Easily overlooked, that is, to untrained ears.
“Please, people. I realize you don’t like to show your hand any more than we do,” Adrian pleaded, speaking on the behalf of the FBI-FD.
“We’re well aware you’re in bed with DARPA one of them said.”
“We’re sure they have all the toys you need,” another one chimed in.
More tinkling glass.
Adrian knew DARPA didn’t let any toys out of the toy chest unless they were good and ready to make that tech known to the world. Corporate was no better when it came to self-serving interests, but if someone did discover what they were up to, by taking the weapon off of Adrian, the American government would pay any of the responsible corporations in the room to track down the missing tech (and you could bet the item would be trackable). And then the government would pay them to keep the tech off the market. That or the corporations in question would recoup their losses on the black market. It was kind of a win-win for everyone in the room, most of all Adrian. So he figured, why not ask?
Obviously, his thinking wasn’t as in sync with corporate’s as he’d thought.
Still, no one was getting up to leave. So that was something. Maybe this was just their idea of hardball negotiations.
“Tell you what, if you don’t trust me and what I’m proposing, I’m all too happy to let one of your guys take one for the team on this one, and run my mission for me. I’m sure we can find a look alike you can put on your payroll, leverage in some kind of way.” He was bluffing, hoping they’d be tempted to lay some chips down on the table.
There was just one head craning to all the others now. And none of the other heads were looking away from the center of the table.
The one head still capable of swiveling finally looked back at Adrian and said, “No.” He pressed his hands against the armrests of his chair, preparing to stand, but didn’t get any further.
His action had been preceded by another tinkling of glass.
“Damn it, Veronica!” Adrian exploded.
“They weren’t going to help you, Adrian. I think you know that,” he heard in his ear on his tiny ear-piece, a modified, eraser-sized hearing-aid. “And the fact that they were willing to risk a pandemic to not help you, even if, like me, they probably suspected your story was total bullshit… Well, they didn’t know for sure, did they? And for that they deserved to die.”
“A contentious point at best. And now who’s going to load me up with the tech toys I need?”
“I will. Or actually they will, only by way of me breaking you into their toy chests.”
“In that case, all is forgiven.” Adrian stood to take in the rogues gallery. Somehow she’d managed to sever their spines and or find the sweet spot in their skulls with a small enough pellet to create the room full of wax works without spilling a drop of blood. It was a special bullet able to penetrate the bulletproof glass despite the small caliber, and without deforming so much it couldn’t do its job. All the same, she would have had to calculate the affected trajectory of the bullets, being partly deflected by the glass panes, just so. And then to produce the wax works effect without one person falling head first into the table… Even factoring in for a special kind of miniature explosive of a bullet, there was no denying her marksmanship, or her knowledge of human anatomy. The sweeping window wall showed no building particularly close to this one, or any likely rooftop perch the shot could have come from.
He gave up staring out the window when he realized he was never going to find her hiding place.
The secretary entered, apparently to inform someone they had another important meeting or phone call, or possibly it had been planned to give everyone in the room a polite reason to leave. She took one look at the room full of dead men, and then a couple beats for the altered reality to register, and gasped.
“Looks like someone heard you about being mad about Warhol,” Adrian said, donning his hat as he exited the boardroom.
Once in the hall, he wasn’t sure which direction to head. “Where am I going?” he mumbled.
“Left,” Veronica’s voice instructed in his in-ear mike. “Take the elevator, go down three floors.”
Adrian did as instructed.
He was being scanned inside the elevator. The results of the scans were being broadcast on the smart-screen walls of the Dr. Who-like box. Apparently he’d been deemed sufficiently non-threatening to let out of the elevator, as the elevator didn’t stop dead in its tracks.
When he got to the floor in question, he said, “What now?”
“Just grab a seat and wait for me, Adrian,” Veronica’s voice said, an impatient tone hijacking the words before they could get all the way from her mouth to his ears.
He grabbed a pleated black leather bench in the hall that had been pushed up against the wall.
The guards were facing him along the opposite wall, which just so happened to be made of smart-glass, allowing him to see into the boardrooms they were guarding, clear to the glass windows overlooking the city against the far wall of the boardrooms. No doubt the glass could be fogged upon request. The soldiers were unmistakably American, but their statuesque poses recalled the Queen’s Palace Guards.
There w
as Veronica Stark, coming as promised—flying a small plane right through the wall of floor-to-ceiling window panes overlooking the city.
Not everyone in the boardroom opposite him survived the crash landing.
Veronica walked out of the plane unscathed.
She was good at that. No one was more prepared for a zombie, End-of-Days movie than this chick. He felt certain she’d survive the zombie apocalypse, not the zombies.
The guards facing him turned, lowered their weapons at her but shortly thereafter acted as if blinded, unsure where to point the weapons, and screamed as if being deafened, as their arms left their assault rifles and migrated to the blood oozing out of their ears.
Adrian asked her when she met him in the hall, “What’s up with the guards?”
“They were wearing smart-contacts that allowed them to get the lowdown on you, pulled off your FBI-FD database files. Easy enough to hack for the purposes of blinding them. As to their in-ear mikes, I think you can figure that part out.”
“You hacked them too? When did you do this? I saw both hands on the steering wheel of your plane, not that you can tell from the mess you left back there.”
“I’m chipped, Adrian. The mindchip has self-evolving algorithms that can be sicced on various tasks while I keep my attention where it belongs.”
Adrian, working for the FBI-FD, was aware there were chipped people out there. Not too many. All of whom were being closely monitored as part of ongoing experiments in human-enhancement. Most of these projects were being overseen by DARPA. Why, exactly, no one had ended the little experiment involving Veronica probably had more to do with hidden agendas that answered to politics, not logic.
Adrian nodded. “Where to now?”
“Follow me.”
He enjoyed the sway of her hips as she walked just ahead of him. “To the ends of the Earth, darling. To the ends of the Earth.”
The alarms were blaring as they stepped over the shattered glass. And then they weren’t. No doubt quieted by the same mysterious self-evolving algorithms, migrating from Veronica’s mind chip like the snakes from Medusa’s head.
They got back into the elevator which refused to move or show any sign of life until Veronica hacked it as well. Then it descended at full speed.
When it reached the basement and the doors parted, Veronica made it through the next set of firewalls. The elevator closed again, and the panel in the elevator suddenly displayed six more subterranean floors. They headed to the bottommost one.
When the doors parted they were greeted to a Star Wars-like lineup of robot guards, all aiming impressive weapons at them far too big for a human to handle. The bullets were being chambered as the gun turrets lowered to them. The sounds accompanying those movements were every bit as menacing as the robots’ body language.
Then came strange decompressing sounds. Followed by a whine like a last gasp into lifelessness as the turrets turned down. The hydraulic fluid supporting their upper body movements drained out of the gun turrets.
Veronica had hacked her way past the robo-bullies. And now they were inside what was convincingly the biggest toy store in the world for advanced weaponry.
“See anything you like?” she said.
“I’ll leave it to you to outfit me like a man who simply cannot be stopped.” He stripped off his trench coat to facilitate her tacking on of weapons.
As they walked through the “store,” Veronica fitted weapons to him inside of holsters that made it easy to disguise their location on his person. “You’ll explain their uses to me later, I presume, when we’re a little less pressed for time.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” As she continued to adorn him with stuff that belonged in a Star Trek episode, she said, “So what’s up with you? Your idea of a hidden weapon is a silver cigarette case.”
“Someone built an unkillable man.”
She stopped feeling up his body for the best location for the latest weapon just long enough to glare at him.
“I never told you this, Adrian, but I don’t date you for excitement. I get enough of that from my day job. I date you because, quite frankly, you’re kind of boring. Just how I like my men.”
“I’ll never forgive myself for shattering your image of me.”
She finished strapping on the latest ray gun like she was dressing a kid, and said, “You have any more to go on?”
“No. We don’t even know if he’s still in the country and we’re feeling rather pressed to get to him before the other side does.”
“Which other side?”
“All other sides. They have us surrounded of late, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“We do have a talent for pissing people off.”
“As much as I relish the chance to get in some digs about our corrupt government which exists for nothing anymore than making the one percent richer at everyone else’s expense, this is probably not the time.”
“I’ve got Trudy working on it.”
“Trudy?” he said.
“My mindchip. According to her, he’s on a plane headed across the Atlantic. No manifest was filed, so we have no idea where he’s headed. Though it’s my guess he’s going to sell himself to the Russians. You’re the one who probably put the idea in his head with your paranoid ideations. After all, the only thing better than an unkillable man is an army full of them you have to get past in order to get to him.”
“How could you even know…?”
“About Biyu? I know about all the women in your life, even the ones you’re not sleeping with yet.”
“Why am I not particularly assuaged by that remark?”
“I should tell you that while I’ve been familiarizing myself with her research, most of it is over my head. So your guess is probably as good as mine as to what will bring this guy down.”
“My guess is probably better than yours, which is why you’re bringing me along.”
“Not on your life, Adrian. You’re no good to me in bed, dead. So unless you’ve got an assassin girlfriend who’s into necrophilia, you’re plum out of luck.”
“This is my cross to bear, darling. And there’s going to be no living with me until I can set things right.”
She looked into his eyes and must have seen he wasn’t bluffing.
“Fine. But when you need to hang back, you hang back. I can’t protect us both and take down some guy who is immune even to the likes of me.”
“Done.”
She tapped one of his body parts that were now loaded for bear. “That one is a ray gun. The laser should slice through most anything. Recommend sweeping it across the neck. Just like taking down a vampire. Let’s see how well he does growing a new head.” She tapped another body part. “This one is an EMP weapon. Might just work against a hybrid that is over fifty-percent synthetic, and relies even more on electrical pulses coursing through his body than we do.” She tapped another body part.
“Will you stop? I’m getting hard.”
She ignored him. “This one… honestly, I’m not sure what that does. That goes for the other three. Trudy’s still hacking her way through the associated inaccessible files with their specifications. Hopefully we’ll know more come time to fire them.”
“So, now I guess we hop a plane.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You don’t catch a plane with another plane. You catch one with a rocket.”
He sighed. “You remind me so much of Monique.”
“The chick with no kill quotas? Who lets most of her victims go if she can avoid putting them down? Who does strategic strikes when she has to murder them to minimize on fall out, and loss of innocent civilian life? What could we possibly have in common?”
He made a sour face. “You’re right. I forgot about your Sergeant Slaughter psychological component for a second.”
Adrian reached for his trench coat. “These weapons should probably be strapped to you, where they might do some good.”
“You don’t worry about me. I try not to rely too much o
n props.”
Adrian donned his trench coat, which successfully cloaked the hidden weapons. And they both made for the door as the alarms sounded yet again.
Someone on the other end was counter-hacking.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Klepsky arrived back at the FBI-FD in time to witness the mindchip being removed from the arm of Rory Bateman. Some of the scientists in this med-lab section of the partitioned-off floor were already rinsing it off and preparing it to undergo a battery of tests. Others were closing Rory up so he didn’t bleed out. No doubt they were keen on getting the chip out of him before the one controlling him could turn him into a weapon to be unleashed on the FBI-FD—well, more than he had already been, in any case.
Ordinarily, Klepsky would contact Adrian immediately to confirm his theory. But he knew he needn’t bother. Adrian was already proceeding as if he were correct. And so he was already several steps ahead of him. And Klepsky had some catching up to do. So with that in mind, he moved quickly to attend to things at his end.
***
David Clancy, the twenty-one-year-old former child-prodigy that Klepsky had put in Ed’s charge, after ruling him out as a candidate for Golem Guy, knew how to make the most of the darkness. He’d zapped Ed twice so far with the laser rifle, and he was not going to do it again on the modified laser tag course, if Ed had anything to say about it. Unlike the ones designed for public recreation, this obstacle-ridden track was part of the FBI-FD compound, and it was used for actual weapons testing.
They were readying two promising prototypes for Adrian now that he had to go up against The Unkillable Man.
Ed made use of his strategically placed mirrors to deflect his laser beam off of, this one positioned high and in the corner like one of those liquor store surveillance mirrors, to score a point on David. He heard him scream in the distance. Ed managed to drown out the screaming with his cackling.
“You’ll pay for that!” David shouted.
Needless to say, they had the laser weapons set to stun.
Ed advanced in the direction of the screaming and cursing.
Unkillable (The Futurist Book 1) Page 25