by Mat Nastos
An instant later the doors swung open with enough force to dent the walls on either side of the entrance and a leprechaun of a man, dressed in khaki pants, a pair of worn Converse, and a Green Lantern tee over a long-sleeved red shirt, came running in. The man, dirty-blond ponytail flapping behind him, was tackled just short of the thirty rows of partially filled auditorium seating behind the inquest.
“Representative Fountain!” the man chanted over and over as he struggled to protect a dark gray case cradled in his arms as Capitol security forces dressed in black suits swarmed over him. His goateed face peeked out from under the mass of fleshed dog-piled on top of him, catching the eyes of the woman at Fountain’s side. “Ms. Roslan! You know me!!”
The normally well-composed woman groaned loudly, recognizing the man immediately. Carl Anderson had been part of the recovery team Director Kiesling had put together to bring Designate Cestus back under control. A spineless little man who had been one of the few remaining members of the staff not yet transferred to a new project. In fact, due to his intimate knowledge of Project Hardwired and its various operations, no one had been completely sure where to put him. He knew too much to let go and not ambitious enough to have gotten Fountain’s attention on his new top secret pet project.
Carl Anderson was a headache whose time had come and Ms. Roslan was, regrettably, out of aspirin.
“Do you know him, ma’am?” asked the head of building security from behind his mirrored sunglass.
Sighing, Melissa Roslan nodded. “He’s a member of the Project Hardwired team. One of our technical agents. I’ll take responsibility for him being here.”
Glaring at the men who had accosted him and still hugging his satchel tightly, Carl crossed the distance over to where Fountain and his legal team stood behind their table.
“Thank you, Ms. Roslan,” the computer geek said to his savior with stars in his eyes.
“I hope you have a very good explanation for your interruption, Mr…” Fountain looked over to Ms. Roslan for help in remembering the grungy little man’s name.
“Anderson,” finished Roslan without a pause.
“We’ve found him, sir,” answered Anderson, smiling from ear-to-ear.
“Found who?”
“Designate Cestus, sir…in Manhattan.” Carl was nearly jumping up and down as he pushed his way to the Congressman’s seat on the floor and queued up a video feed on the laptop computer he was carrying. “He’s gone viral.”
“What?!” Fountain and Roslan exclaimed simultaneously.
Everyone in the room—senators, lawyers, personal assistants, even interns, crowded around the beaming Carl to watch the shaky news feed he pulled up on the screen of his device. The grainy images showed Malcolm Weir’s rescue of Benjamin Gilbert, taken with cellphone cameras from a hundred vantage points.
“The press has no idea who he is, but the face recognition software I’ve been running for weeks positively identified the man as former US Army Captain Malcolm Weir,” chimed Carl.
“When did this happen,” asked Pezzula, mortified that the government’s dirty laundry was being displayed so openly by the liberal media.
“Two hours ago in Manhattan.”
Every pair of eyes in the room turned at once, locking in on Michael Fountain. Every ounce of blood drained out of his face, blanching the man white enough to be almost transparent.
He knew he was in trouble as Pezzula leaned into his microphone, a Cheshire cat’s grin plastered on the petite man’s face. “What are you going to do about this, Fountain?”
“Well, Mr. Chairman, we’re going to…” started Fountain, red boiling back up from his neck and into his cheeks. He hated to be on the losing side of the desks. The game was a lot more fun for the congressman when he was the one doing the ass-reaming. It was even worse because he had been responsible for the shut down and investigation of Project Hardwired in the first place. He could hear that bastard Kiesling laughing from whatever spot in hell they consigned him to after his failure thirty days earlier.
“A black ops team was in route forty-six minutes ago, Senator Pezzula,” interrupted Carl, growing more and more pleased with himself.
Fountain was shocked.
“On whose authority?!” he demanded.
“Why your’s, sir,” replied Carl, confused.
Hearing those words caused Michael Fountain’s blood to boiling, sending him into a violent enough rage that Ms. Roslan fully expected to see steam erupting from both of his ears.
“WHAT?!”
Anderson scratched his head at the outburst and shot a worried look at Ms. Roslan in hopes of a support he didn’t find in her eyes.
Licking his lips, Anderson answered with a half-smile, “Yesterday afternoon in the debriefing you told us that we should ‘nuke that inbred hillbilly from Texas’ if we had the chance. Based on your orders, we had a team in the air within minutes of identifying Mr. Weir…”
The little man may have had more to say, but he was cut off by a bellow from the Texas senator seated up on the raised dais. Before anyone knew what was happening, Kotkin was already leaping across the hard oak table with blood in his eyes.
*****
Senator Kotkin had nearly strangled Representative Fountain into unconsciousness before on-site security had been able to restrain the enraged politician and get the man to safety.
The melee had cleared the room of and saved the congressman from sanctions, at least for the immediate future. It would take Pezzula’s group a few days to get the witch-hunt back on track…time enough for the bedraggled Fountain to sort things out himself.
As much as he hated to admit it, the little nerd’s distraction had been to Fountain’s benefit in the end. Even more delicious was Joe Pezzula’s number one flunky losing his temper in front of the entire Senate subcommittee investigating the aftermath of Project Hardwired’s collapse. Not only did it make ol’ Joe and his cronies look bad, but it also reset the doomsday countdown that had been ticking away ever since the senator from Arizona had targeted the Californian statesman.
It couldn’t have worked out better if Fountain had planned it himself.
Still, in spite of Anderson’s ‘help,’ the man needed to be taken care of. He had been one of the first men recruited to the tech-division of Project Hardwired by Gordon Kiesling and that meant he knew too much to be allowed to continue to operate freely.
Fountain needed him taken care of…silenced as quickly, quietly, as possible. And he knew exactly who he’d get to handle to situation.
“Miss Ros…a…lan,” called Fountain loudly in a voice that stretched his executive assistant’s name out into more syllables than it normally possessed. “A moment of your time if you please.”
“Yes, of course, Congressman Fountain,” responded Roslan courtly as she excused herself from the proceedings.
The lovely woman followed her new boss out of the double doors that filled the entrance to the hearing chamber they had been forced to spend most of their day in. She could tell from the quickness of his step and the way the rolls on the back of his neck shook that the man was in a state of rather significant agitation. Roslan had been an executive assistant for long enough to recognize the body language and knew immediately her workload was going to increase dramatically because of it.
Staring down at the woman who worked for him, Fountain quickly worked himself up into a lather and gripped her roughly by the shoulders.
“Get rid of that little bastard…permanently,” hissed Fountain, showering the shorter Roslan with enraged spittle.
“Can you be more specific, sir,” she responded, wiping the fine mist of bodily fluid from the bridge of her nose with a handkerchief that seemed to magically appear in her hands. “We seem to be inundated with ‘little bastards’ at the moment and I need to know which to get rid of.”
“Anderson. Take care of him before we leave for the East Coast.”
“I’ll have human resources work up his termination papers imm
ediately, Congressman Fountain,” she replied, pulling out her smartphone to make the call.
Fountain reached out and grabbed his assistant’s hand in an iron grip, crushing her fingers against the small electronic device.
“Don’t play games with me, Melissa,” growled Fountain. His anger spread across his face like a rash, spiking his blood pressure high enough to cause the thin gray comb-over covering the top of his head to twitch with every beat of the man’s heart. “No one embarrasses me like that and gets away with it. I want the man liquidated.”
Removing her hand from her boss’s grasp, Melissa Roslan responded in the completely professional tone that had become her calling card.
“I’ll take care of Mr. Anderson right away, sir,” her eyes betrayed no emotion. “Is there anything else?”
“Give it to one of Kiesling’s old boys, Ms. Roslan…let’s see who is loyal to the new management. Yes?”
CHAPTER 5
Although there was very little in life Mal hated more than someone trying to kill him, the former government cyborg super-soldier was relieved when the attack finally came. It meant that the days and weeks he had spent entrenched in neurotic paranoia hadn’t just been the product of an over-active, and self-centered, imagination.
It also meant that, much to his chagrin, Mal finally understood Zuz…not that the cyborg would ever admit that fact to his friend. David Zuzelo already had enough paranoia in his life without Mal helping to fan the flames with confirmation of his obsessions. The Internet already did more than enough for the man on that end without his assistance.
The ambush came deep in the bowels of the New York City subway system. Mal’s distressed flight from his loss of control to the Cestus programming on the streets above had taken him into the belly of Manhattan once more. He had decided to risk venturing into the tunnels yet again because he had assumed nothing would confound anyone trying to track him more than a hundred thousand angry New York morning commuters.
Or so the super-soldier thought.
In actuality, thanks to the semi-coherent report taken bedside from bank guard Mike Salcido at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, it was the first place five teams of wetworks operatives sanctioned by the US government to take the renegade cyborg down had been sent to look. And it took them less than two hours to finally pinpoint their prey’s location.
Surrounded by a seething monsoon of people, battered on all sides by waves of ‘pardon me’s’ and ‘move it’s,’ and still feeling the effects of the rather intense migraine that had been plaguing his brain since he’d left the west coast, Mal’s senses had been reduced to only a foot or two beyond his personal space. Anything past that threatened to overwhelm him.
That withdrawal into himself allowed the first of his attackers to take the cyborg completely by surprise seconds after he had disembarked from the southbound 1 train near 33rd street. Four men dressed in black riot gear and full helmets with skulls painted across their visors burst out of the crowd. Normally that sort of thing would have been at the top of Mal’s list of ‘weird shit,’ but the strangeness of their appearance was overshadowed by the fact that the cyborg’s internal computer sensors were unable to identify the types of weapons the attackers were bringing to bear against him.
“Wow, space ninjas,” was all Mal had time to think before a blast of emerald energy from one of his attacker’s palms took him in the chest and threw him off the subway platform and sent him rolling across the empty train tracks seven feet below.
Not at all pleased to find himself floundering once more down on the less-than-sanitary tracks of the New York City Subway system, Mal barely had time to get to his knees when the dark men leapt off the cement floor of the terminal to press their attack on him.
To the casual observer, Mal’s assailants would have seemed to be nearly identical in their military garb, but to the cyborg’s trained eyes they were very different.
The first one to reach the ground had larger arms than the others. Larger arms and over-sized gauntlets that ended in thickly segmented fingers and a disk that glowed with a rather nauseating green energy signature. Although Mal’s cybernetic systems were unable to immediately identify the specifics of the weapons array built into the man’s uniform, it did trace the source of their power to a power pack located in the center of his lower back.
Mal’s examination of the mercenary was short lived as the man used the momentum from his landing to roll expertly up into a crouch and let loose with a second round of energy blasts—the first of which went wide to Mal’s right, causing him to dodge directly into the path of the follow up attack. He’d been suckered by a feint—a rookie mistake. The second dose of the energy weapon caught Mal in forearm, rendering its cybernetic functions inoperative.
“Weapon identified as an electrically conductive laser-induced plasma channel combined with a high intensity electroshock current. Final voltage estimated at ten to the eighth power,” quipped the computerized hitchhiker installed in the back of Mal’s head. “Port systems offline. Avoid further contact while hard reboot is in progress.”
“‘Avoid further contact?’” A pained laugh escaped from Mal’s lips as he dodged more palm-based blasts from his opponent. The cyborg was convinced his computer had been programed with a rather obnoxious sense of humor and to thoroughly enjoy his discomfort. Much like his first ex-wife.
Fists of mammoth proportions, attached to a giant of a man—six foot nine inches and approximately three-hundred forty pounds according to the electronic voice sharing the back quarter of his brain—impacting with enough force to snap his head completely around, quickly reminded Mal that the mercenary was not alone in his mission to bring the renegade back under the government’s control.
Powered by an exoskeleton mounted to the outside of his uniform, the beast of a mercenary’s strength was amplified at least twenty-fold by Mal’s calculations and each time one of his large fists missed they left half-moon divots in the thick stone ground six-inches in depth. Even a glancing blow from one of those sledgehammers would crush bones or liquefy internal organs.
The two black-clad government operatives attacked Mal in a coordinated series of well-rehearsed movements that kept him off-balance and unable to gain an offensive position of his own. Brows furrowing, mind ticking off the seconds until his system could reconfigure to handle the peculiar energy his attackers weapons generated, Mal realized the men had been trained and outfitted to take him down. They probably knew more about his systems than he did. If he was lucky and could take one of his attackers alive, Mal might even be able to use them to get some of the answers he’d been looking for since the moment he broke free of Hardwired’s control.
“Hey, Knuckles, any chance we can talk this out?”
Watching the two warriors in front of him, and aware of the two attempting to flank him at the same time, the renegade didn’t hold much hope that any of the men would agree to help.
“C’mon, guys…this whole ‘witty banter’ thing only works if we’re all contributing,” joked Mal even as he dropped down into a fighting stance, ready for whatever the black ops team had planned next.
The man Mal had mentally dubbed ‘Knuckles’ moved first, punching forward in a double palm thrust and releasing an energy beam at least four-feet in diameter. Mal flipped out of the way, his incapacitated left arm still dangling uselessly at his side as he did.
“Another sham attack,” Mal thought to himself, raising a blind block with his good arm.
The foresight and instincts bred through more than fifteen years of combat service in the United States Army allowed the veteran soldier to deflect a haymaker from the titanic operative—a man Mal had labeled as ‘Ogre.’ The nicknames helped wily ex-Ranger to better track his enemies in his mind’s eye, as well as with the enhanced sensory array built into his body. The names themselves may have been childish, but the technique was one that had been used by military forces for centuries. Mal pulled the giant, still off-balance from his missed a
ttack, by grabbing the straps holding his armored breastplate in place and used the man’s momentum to flip up onto his shoulders.
“Down you go, big boy!”
A hard kick into the giant’s back allowed Mal to propel himself across the eight intervening feet to the energy-gauntlet-wielding mercenary. A jump spin hook kick split Knuckles’ helmet, along with the head beneath it, like a ripe melon.
Mal was unsure whether or not he had killed the man or just knocked him senseless because his computerized mental sidekick screamed a warning, ending any thoughts he had of checking to see.
Twin blades fashioned of solidified emerald light missed the cyborg’s body by less than centimeters thanks to the alarm raised in his head. The unneeded thanks that formed on Mal’s lips just reinforced the strange love-hate relationship he’d developed with the cybernetic systems installed into the back of his skull by the butchers at Project Hardwired. Half the time he wanted to kill the thing and the other half he wanted to kiss it…again reminding the former army man of his ex-wife.
The third member of the wetworks team flipped into view, spinning the glowing swords in front of him in an offensive display of his martial prowess.
“Lightsabers?!” Mal chortled, dodging a second pair of slashes from attacker number three. “You’ve got freakin’ lightsabers?!” Mal decided to himself that the merc’s name could only be ‘Anakin.’
“Energy analysis complete,” chimed Mal’s computer. “Counter-measures initiated.” Very few words had ever given Mal more pleasure and he grinned widely as his left arm snapped back into full operation.
“Excellent,” grinned Mal as he caught a downward strike from Anakin in a double sweeping block between his forearms and followed it up with a roundhouse kick backed by enough power to shatter the man’s faceplate, sending him spinning completely around. The cyborg pressed his advantage, leaping forward with a knee-smash to his opponent’s chest, taking Anakin down to the ground. Bones, hidden beneath layers of Kevlar and carbon fiber nanotube armor, shattered, sending dagger-like slivers of broken ribcage deep into the man’s internal organs. A stream of black blood frothed up through the man’s mouth and erupted out the cracks in his helmet as his life ended in one final sigh.