The Cestus Contract: Weir Codex Book 2

by Mat Nastos

  “You’re the monster here,” spat Amy, shaking with rage.

  Nodding, Grail sighed, his eyes dropping to the floor. “With that statement the one can only agree, my lady. We are what our masters have made us—no more, no less. But unlike your friend, Mr. Weir, I accept the path fate has led me down.”

  The mood was shattered as the thick wooden door was pushed opened from the outside and slammed against the room’s inner wall with a thud. A figure was silhouetted in the now open entryway. Amy couldn’t make out any details about the man but could see a large stone room extending into darkness beyond him. Glinting from somewhere deep in the murky shadows, the woman swore she could make out the figure of a crucifix peering out of the blackness.

  “They brought me to a church?” Amy wished she hadn’t been such a lapsed Catholic in her adult years, running through the list of churches she’d visited during her decade in New York. It wasn’t a very big list and none of the buildings she’d been in matched what she glimpsed briefly behind the man.

  “Sir?” The newcomer paused in the open doorway, waiting for his leader to respond.

  Grail bowed subtly at Amy before turning to the mercenary. “Yes, Mr. McGann, what is it?”

  Eyes jerking from the woman roped to the chair and back to Grail, McGann half-whispered, “It’s time, sir.”

  Waving his underling away, Grail stood and watched as Roddick followed the pilot out of the room. Everything they had been planning was about to come to fruition. Soon Malcolm Weir would be in their grasp once more.

  “I am afraid I must put an end to our little tête-à-tête, Ms. Jensen.” Grail moved over to the table from which the dull green metal helmet had watched their entire conversation with glowing eyes. “I must hurry if I am going to arrange a proper rendezvous with the truant Mr. Weir.”

  “What are you going to do with me now?” Amy asked, the totality of her predicament finally settling across her mind.

  “My men will see to your needs. Keep you comfortable and secure,” Grail said, donning the dark green helmet that, once in place, added an eerie electronic filter to his voice. He turned toward Amy one final time as he stood in the brightened doorway that was the room’s only egress. “You will be released unharmed once Designate Cestus is in our custody.”

  Amy winced openly with the closing of the door behind her captor. The few inches of wood and stone between her and freedom seemed infinite without the light from the other side. Breathing deeply, Amy sighed and prayed to God Mal would find her soon. The woman hoped, being tied up in the forgotten basement of some church, her plea might stand a good chance of being answered. Until then, though, she might as well keep herself amused.

  “So, boys,” called Amy to the two men standing watch a few feet away. “Anyone got a deck of cards?”

  CHAPTER 20

  Crowds walked past the stairs leading up to the main branch of the New York Public Library in complete ignorance, never once looking up to admire the great stone pillars lining the entrance or the massive twin marble lions standing guard before them. For citizens jaded by the sight of such a magnificent piece of architecture, the group of men congregating off to one side of the structure drew even fewer glances, despite their rather unusual nature.

  Numbering six, the bulk of the band consisted of four dark men in dark suits wearing dark sunglasses. All very imposing and with heads that continually bobbed two and fro as they attempted to take note of everyone that walked past or came within arm’s reach. Those pedestrians who did wander too close for comfort were shooed away with imposing stares over the top of the matching Ray-Bans the bodyguards wore or, when that failed, with a harsh word and a shove.

  Standing in the center of the widely spaced men were a pair mismatched in every way: one was a properly dressed man, well beyond his prime, clad from head-to-toe in an expensive business suit. A double-breasted Burberry London trench coat rested across the man’s folded arm. Across from him was his opposite number: a tall, broad man in his late thirties, dressed in the shabby, threadbare garments of a vagrant.

  “I must say, Mr. Weir, you don’t look like the pictures I’ve seen at all,” announced the sixty-four year-old Senator David McGuinness. The man in the dark suit extended a hand that was covered in the liver-spots of a man who had felt a lot of hard years in his life. “I’d always assumed you would be taller…and have more hair.”

  The comment caught Mal off-guard. The last thing the cyborg expected in his meeting with one of the men responsible for the hell his life had become was humor, even if it was delivered with complete dead-pan. Of course, thought Mal as he ran fingers cased in rough leather gloves across the hairless space over his eyes, the man did have a good point. The nanobots in his system had done wonders with the repairs to the recent damages he’d experienced to skin, bones and internal organs, but when it came to his hair not much had grown back beyond a few pathetic patches sprouting up on top of his head. His eyebrows remained non-existent, making the former army ranger feel naked out in public.

  “It’s hard to do anything pretty to my hair with your people constantly trying to kill me, Senator,” responded Mal as he accepted the proffered hand. The heat of the living metal beneath the thick material of Mal’s gloves was enough to cause McGuinness to jerk his fingers away quickly. Pale yellow leather was already beginning to discolor and brown from the high temperature. If the nanobots didn’t finish their healing work soon, the cyborg would have to discard the hand wraps in the next hour or risk them having holes burned through.

  “They are hardly my ‘people,’ Mr. Weir. My involvement with Project Hardwired ended before you destroyed it, I’m afraid.” McGuinness took half a step back and worked to rub the discomfort from his palm.

  “So you admit you were involved with the bastard Kiesling and his shop of monster makers?” Adrenaline began pumping through Mal’s body and he could feel his cybernetics responding. Old leather groaned and creaked along its stitching, threatening to split open from the pressure of titanium-alloyed appendages bulking up inside of coat sleeves already half a size too small for the man wearing them.

  Glances flew back and forth between the men surrounding Mal and the Senator. Hands twitched reflexively in the direction of bulges hidden beneath tight fitting sports coats. Each man present had been briefed on the super human abilities of Malcolm Weir, on what he was capable of and what he had done in the past while in the ‘employment’ of the United States government as a black-ops agent. They all knew that, in spite of whatever elite training each of them possessed, they stood little chance against the cyborg. They may have been killers in their own rights, but he was an apex predator, born, bred, and designed to be the best there was at what he did.

  McGuinness stepped forward and placed his hand on Mal’s shoulder in an effort to diffuse a chance of a violent outburst between the cyborg and his bodyguards. He then motioned for his men to calm down. The last thing the Senator wanted was for a massacre to break out in front of a New York City landmark.

  “I’d be a fool not to admit it,” said the Senator as calmly as he could while holding onto a living weapon capable of tearing him limb from limb in seconds. “That you’re here speaking to me means you’ve already confirmed that fact. I was part of the committee responsible for setting up what became Project Hardwired.”

  “How can a man like you…a man with your record of honesty and morality…have been part of something that was so…wrong?”

  The congressman’s eyes tightened a bit at Mal’s accusation and the men locked eyes. Breaking off from the stare down, the aging politician slowly reached into the breast pocket of the overcoat slung across his arm, exaggerating the motion so Mal wouldn’t take it for an aggressive movement.

  “It’s been almost a year since I read your file, Mr. Weir, so I can’t recall. Do you have children?”

  “No, sir. I was married twice…and almost married again before the accident in Dahuk, but my military career always seemed to get in the way of ha
ving them.” Mal’s response was strained. He’d always wanted children of his own. It was something he and Kristin had talked about constantly. And now he wasn’t sure kids were something that would ever be in the cards for him.

  Nodding, McGuinness removed a large dark brown leather billfold from the jacket, flipping it open to reveal a faded snapshot of a clean-cut young man in his early twenties. The youth in the photo shared features with the congressman—tightly cropped blond hair, brown eyes, a straight Roman nose and solid chin all peered out over the dress uniform of an Air Force officer. The family resemblance was considerable.

  “This is my son, Mr. Weir. Robert…we called him Bobby,” a sliver of a smile played with the corners of the older man’s mouth. “My wife and I were only able to have one child before the cancer took her…he was the light of my life. The last happiness she gave me before she left this world.”

  “He looks like a good kid, Senator…aside from being in the Air Force, that is.” Mal didn’t know what sort of game the man was playing, but he’d play along for now.

  “The Air Force…” McGuinness’s voice trailed off as he stroked the picture with the thumb of his left hand. “His choice to join the military during these times of duress was the only bone of contention between us. He was a young man whose belly was filled with the fire of patriotism who wanted to do his part to make the world a better place.”

  “You can’t fault him for that. Military service is an honorable calling…of course, I may be a bit biased on that.”

  “Robert…Bobby, my son, was sent to Iraq for his first deployment,” Mal could see the memories playing back in the Senator’s eyes as McGuinness recounted his story. “Behind his back I pulled some strings to have him reassigned to the 332nd Expeditionary Ops Group stationed at Balad. I figured it was as safe a station as any in Iraq.”

  “Camp Anaconda? My unit took R&R there once…they had a Pizza Hut,” nodded Mal. “It would have been a pretty cushy posting for anyone.”

  An annoyed look played its way across the Senator’s features. His eyes snapped up to meet Mal’s once more, locking on. “Bobby was furious when he found out. He volunteered for a support mission flying with the 119th…it was supposed to last for three weeks. My son’s F-16 was shot down forty-two minutes in over a particularly nasty shithole called Tal’Afar.”

  The sensors in Mal’s brain detected an elevation in the Senator’s pulse. So far, all indications had been that the man was genuinely distraught and telling the truth. It didn’t make the cyborg trust him anymore, but at least it showed McGuinness was as honest as the reports said. “What happened to him?” Mal asked the question although he already knew what the answer would be. “Was he killed?”

  “No. He had been able to eject before his plane went down. Somehow, though, he had become entangled in the cords of his parachute,” sighed the Senator. Even a year later it was still difficult for him to speak of his son. “It strangled him…cut off his oxygen. By the time they found Bobby he was…Bobby survived. Well, a part of him did.”

  “Brain dead?”

  Unable to speak, the Senator nodded his affirmation. A handkerchief materialized from somewhere within the man’s jacket and hid the watery eyes of McGuinness for a few seconds before he could continue his tale.

  “That’s when Gordon Kiesling came to visit me. Right after my son had been brought back from overseas. He came to offer his condolences, he said. And to offer hope.” Mal could sense the anger growing in the Senator at the mention of Project Hardwired’s former director. An anger closely resembling his own. “Kiesling brought an encyclopedia’s worth of papers detailing their plans. He brought slideshows, photos…he introduced me to a beautiful women he said could bring my son back.”

  “Dr. Ryan?” asked Mal forcing back his own fury.

  “Yes. Carly Ryan. According to Kiesling her cybernetics work had reached the point where it could restore a patient in a vegetative state to normal,” answered McGuinness. “They showed me what had been accomplished with some other soldiers. Men who had been killed and brought back to life. Staring at the body of my son, laying in a hospital bed and being kept alive with beeping machines, it seemed to be the answer to my prayers. They gave me hope.”

  Removing the glove from his left hand, Mal held it up for the Senator to see the way light played off of the ever-moving living metal of its surface. “But it wasn’t what they promised was it, Senator?”

  “The cruelest thing someone can offer a grieving parent is hope,” responded McGuinness with sadness. “They brought my son back to me a month later, but he was not the same. He was like you were, Mr. Weir, when the computer was in control. A meat puppet directed by a cold, unfeeling puppetmaster.”

  The conversation was interrupted as a group of college students rambled by, their laughter and friendly cajoling of one another disrupting the grim conversation between the two men. A nod from McGuinness to one of the stoic bodyguards shooed the lunchtime partiers along, leaving the group alone. Once the immediate area was clear of onlookers, Mal worked up the nerve to pose the question he had traveled across a continent to ask.

  “Why me?” The voice that emerged from the cyborg was full of pleading. “If you saw what it had done to your son, why allow it to be done to the others…to me?”

  The Senator was genuinely confused by Mal’s question. “Why you? Lad, because you asked us.”

  Mal was blindsided by the statement.

  “What?!”

  McGuinness turned to look Mal over, focusing on his face. After a moment, the older man released a sad laugh. “You really don’t remember, do you, son?”

  “My mind is blank for the last year…the last thing I remember was my unit’s helicopter taking fire and an explosion. After that…nothing until I woke up in a lab with a computer in my brain and these…,” Mal held up his arms, mentally altering the shapes of his fingers into wicked knives that cut through his gloves. “…attached to my body. Because of you people and your games, I lost a year of my life. I lost the woman I loved. I lost everything!”

  Without realizing it, Mal’s arms began to shred the worn jacket he’d picked up from a homeless man in the Village. He was breathing heavily and on the verge of grabbing the politician around the neck and making him pay for the crimes the man had been an active party to. McGuinness’s bodyguards moved as one to block Mal from reaching the Senator. Guns appeared in the hands of two of the men before the older man spoke up finally.

  “You may have been tricked by Kiesling, Mr. Weir, but you begged to be a part of the program. You were a broken man—your arms had been amputated, one of your lungs was gone…hell, son, from what your file said, you were shitting through a tube in your side. It may have been fool’s gold they were offering, but you took hold of it with both…” The senator looked down at the talons emerging from the ends of Mal’s fists. “…hands…as it were.”

  “Help me take them down…Kiesling is dead, but there were others responsible. Dr. Ryan…the other men in charge of Hardwired. Help me take them down once and for all,” pleaded Mal. If he could get the Senator on his side, the cyborg was sure he could end his torment, and his tormentors, once and for all.

  “No.”

  The flat out refusal stunned Mal. “What? How can you say that? They’ve hurt you as much as they have me. How can you just sit by and let them continue?”

  “Excuse us, gentlemen,” said McGuinness to the large men surrounding the pair and waving them away. Once the bodyguards had moved out of earshot, the Senator continued. “They have my son, Mr. Weir. Out in one of their holding facilities, they have Bobby. And with him, they have me. My hands are tied.”

  Mal swore to himself. Of course, the son. It made sense that someone as ruthless as Gordon Kiesling would have put safeguards in place to guarantee no one could move against him or his beloved Project Hardwired. It was the only way to keep a man like McGuinness in line. Otherwise, he would have already done everything in his power to bring the bastards
down.

  A wrinkled hand reached out and grabbed Mal’s wrist lightly. “But your hands aren’t.”

  “What do you have in mind, Senator?” asked Mal, intrigued by the man’s gesture.

  “Find my son, Mr. Weir. Find him and bring him home. If you do that for me, I will help you destroy them,” ordered the politician, finally revealing the fire that burned deep within his soul.

  “Senator…who are the Hollow Men?” Mal watched the face of the man as he asked, trying to gauge McGuinness’s reaction to the question that had begun to plague the cyborg’s entire existence.

  The ploy paid off as the elder congressman’s face twitched slightly. The blank facade he had been showing cracked for the briefest of instants before closing back up.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Weir, and I think it is time for me to bid you good day.” Although the congressman’s stoic face was solidly back in place, his demeanor had changed. Mal could tell the man was worried. “Contact me once you’ve found my son.”

  A ringing from the senator’s pocket startled both men, breaking the tension hanging between them with its shrill beeping. McGuinness looked up from the voice on the other end of the call and stared at Mal with an odd expression.

  “Yes…he’s right here.” McGuinness held the small black mobile phone out towards Mal and shook it. “It’s…for you, Mr. Weir.”

  Gripping the phone tightly in his hand, Mal spoke softly, “Hello?”

  “Greetings,” the now-familiar received pronunciation of Grail fell into Mal’s ears as he pressed the politician’s phone up to his face. “We have someone here who wishes to speak with you, good sir.”

  On the other end of the call, Amy Jensen’s voice called out frantically, “Mal! Don’t listen to him!”

  “Amy!” Red flushed into Mal’s face and the cyborg spun in a circle, reaching out with his computerized senses to search the area for his enemy. If the Englishman knew he was with McGuinness it could mean he was close enough to watch them.