Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  An arched passageway took her to another gallery, but unlike the first, this room contained memorabilia from a more recent era in history. At first, she thought the room was devoted to medical history. The walls were lined with shelves displaying skulls and skeletal fragments, jars containing organs preserved in a liquid solution. Some were marked with a numerical code, handwritten on yellowed placards and adhesive labels. The room also contained pictures, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of black and white photographs.

  Fiona now regretted having eaten before making her bid for freedom. The pictures were the stuff of nightmares. There were photographs of men and women of all ages. Children, too. In fact, a disproportionate number of the photographs were of children. They were all naked and helpless, staring bleakly at the camera. Many were emaciated; all looked defeated. Those were the easiest to look at. There were pictures of corpses, amputated limbs and bodies opened up for post-mortem examinations, but those were not the worst. The worst were the photos that showed what happened in-between.

  Fiona quickly recognized the pictures for what they were, a record of ghastly medical experiments, carried out on living human victims. That was when she saw a large, freestanding trophy case at the far end of the room. In it, before a background of framed diplomas, awards and portraits of a dark-haired man with a gap-toothed smile, stood a mannequin dressed in an immaculate gray-green military uniform, replete with a peaked cap and something that looked like lightning bolts on the collar.

  A Nazi uniform.

  She gave the exhibit only a cursory inspection. The contents confirmed what she had already guessed. This was a very different kind of Holocaust memorial, one that celebrated the torture and murder of millions and honored those who had perpetrated such unimaginable cruelty.

  There was a door just behind the display, a regular door with a handle that turned when she tested it. To her dismay, it opened into yet another large room. With stark white walls, overhead fluorescent lighting and a dull gray industrial epoxy floor, the space looked like a factory warehouse. Despite the fact that the room was far more utilitarian than the preceding galleries after the horrors she had just witnessed, it was a welcome change.

  She hurried past row after row of work tables, trying to ignore the contents, lest she discover new horrors. One item, however, caught her eye.

  It stood in the center of the room like a suit of medieval armor decorating the entrance to a castle keep. It was armor, in fact, but there was nothing antiquated about it. It looked more like something from a super-hero movie.

  The suit was a full-body armored exoskeleton. Fiona had heard about the military’s intention to develop Iron Man-style battle suits for soldiers, though in her opinion, it looked more like the armor worn by Master Chief in the Halo games, right down to the bubble-shaped reflective visor in the helmet. As far as she knew, the project was still in the early design phase.

  So how had Cerberus gotten their hands on it?

  She recalled what Dourado had said about Cerberus providing anything for the right price. Had they stolen a prototype of the military exosuit? Or perhaps built this from leaked, classified plans?

  The suit, which appeared to have been posed like the mannequin of the SS officer in the display case, offered no clues. She couldn’t tell if it was even functional.

  But if it is…

  Inspiration hit her like a lightning bolt. If the suit was operational, maybe she could use it to escape this nightmare. She took a step closer, searching for some way of opening the armored carapace.

  There was a flash of movement, and something struck her in the side, knocking her backward. The blow stunned her, and the next thing she knew, she was lying in a heap on the floor, twenty feet from the exosuit. The pain arrived before she could even think about trying to rise, but in the corner of her eye, she saw the dull gray suit moving, advancing toward her.

  She struggled to recover, attempted to roll over and push herself up, but her left arm refused to work, and she collapsed face down on the floor. As she lay there, trying to will herself into motion, she could feel the vibration of each mechanical footfall as the exosuit stalked relentlessly toward her.

  Thump. Thump.

  Move it!

  She tried again, bracing her right arm in front of her. The adrenaline of pure panic flooded through her body, numbing her against the throb of pain and supplying almost superhuman strength.

  But she wasn’t fast enough.

  The exosuit loomed over her, and even as she tried to roll out of the way, an armored fist descended.

  Then, she saw nothing at all.

  29

  Belem, Brazil

  Getting past her own front door had been hell for Cintia Dourado. Each step after that got progressively harder.

  “I can do this,” she told herself, repeating the words like a mantra. The affirmation had gotten her across the city, all the way to the airport, but she remained unconvinced.

  She had survived the taxi ride by keeping her head down, staring at the floor. But now, out here on the edge of the runway at the Val de Cans International Airport, with nothing but wide open sky above, the simple act of standing seemed as daunting as escaping the event horizon of a black hole.

  Though she had never consulted a mental health practitioner or received a professional diagnosis, Dourado was well aware of her condition. Agoraphobia. An irrational anxiety associated with public places and wide open spaces. Her paranoia was almost certainly the result of psychological trauma sustained in early childhood. She had no memories of life before the debilitating panic disorder had clamped down on her like steel manacles, and in truth, she did not want to know. She had escaped the slums, and had no inclination to revisit them, even in her mind’s eye.

  She had discovered computers at age twelve and quickly mastered cyberspace, roaming its vastness like a buccaneer, plying the deep web, trading in secrets and taking whatever she needed. Strangely, the possibility of being caught had not frightened her at all. Even though she had known that being arrested for her computerized transgressions would shatter her world, the risk did not trigger her agoraphobia. Rather, it had become her own version of an extreme sport, supplying an addictive endorphin rush that not only caused her to feel alive, but pushed her to new heights. Made her better. Smarter.

  Smart enough to crack the Herculean Society.

  That had been a transformational moment for her, making it possible for her to trade the squalor of her single room apartment in Tenoné for a luxury condominium in the upscale Nazareth neighborhood. Not that the surroundings mattered much. The digital landscape was her true home now, the only place where she felt safe and in control. She could go anywhere, know anything she wanted to know, without ever stepping outside. Everything she needed for physical survival could be ordered online and delivered to her doorstep, with a bare minimum of human interaction.

  So why had she volunteered to do this?

  On an intellectual level, she knew the answer. The Herculean Society had given her the one thing she had not even realized was missing from her life. A purpose. She was a part of something important, no longer living just for herself. And now the Society needed something from her. People that she cared about, even though she had never met them, were in danger, and she was in the best position to help them. The calculation had been simple enough. A very real, life-and-death situation outweighed irrational panic every time.

  That much was enough to get her through the front door. She had hoped it would get easier after that.

  It hadn’t.

  She could feel the contemptuous stares of strangers. Dozens of them. Hundreds. She knew there were actually only a handful of people coming and going from the private charter aircraft hangar situated north of the runway, and that none had given her more than a passing glance, but it did not ease her anxiety.

  She took out her smartphone and opened her air traffic control app. The act of checking the handheld computing device and connecting with the digital univer
se helped steady her nerves a little. The app confirmed that the Cerberus plane was still running on time and it would arrive in less than thirty minutes.

  Thirty minutes. Could she survive that long?

  She felt the void of the sky overhead, overwhelming in its immensity.

  Inside. I need to get inside.

  That was a bad idea though. She could not enter the secure area of the hangar, where the plane would eventually be parked, and even if she could, that was not her intent. Pierce had been very clear about not getting close to the jet or its occupants. She was to observe from a safe distance. Nothing more.

  What exactly constituted a safe distance, she had no idea.

  She spent the next few minutes searching for a sheltered place with a direct line of sight to the hangar, and found it in a wooded area more than two hundred yards away. The distance would be a problem, but she was able to overcome that limitation by using her phone’s camera at maximum zoom. The dense trees made her feel a little less exposed, and for the first time since leaving her residence, she caught her breath.

  Several planes came and went, mostly larger commercial birds from international carriers, but one aircraft caught her attention, not because it was a helicopter—another handy app revealed it to be a Sikorsky S-61L—but because the large rotor-wing passenger aircraft settled down right next to the hangar she was keeping an eye on. The whirling blades gradually wound down to a stop, but no one emerged from the aircraft.

  Curious, Dourado checked the registration numbers painted on the helicopter’s tail. She traced its ownership to a company that provided logistical support to remote logging and mining operations throughout the Amazon Basin.

  She knew that was no coincidence. They were waiting for the passengers aboard the incoming Learjet. The Cerberus people were going to transfer to the helicopter, and then head to some unknown destination. Because helicopters were not required to file flight plans, there would be no way to track them once they left, short of accessing a Brazilian military radar tracking station.

  She stared at her phone in impotent frustration, until it occurred to her that there was a way to track them. The realization of what that would involve brought on another wave of panic.

  One simple hack, she told herself. If I can do that, the rest will be easy.

  The hack was simple. She breezed through firewalls and tore through the encryption like it was digital tissue paper. After that, it was just a matter of data entry. It took all of two minutes.

  She checked the air traffic control app again. The Cerberus jet was on final approach. It would be on the ground in a matter of minutes.

  “I can do this.”

  She broke from cover and walked briskly toward the hangar, staring at the ground so she would not have to look at the sky. It didn’t help. She could feel it, the open emptiness like a yawning abyss trying to devour her.

  She reached the door, entered the security code she had illicitly obtained and moved inside.

  Being indoors again, even in this unfamiliar environment, eased the agoraphobic panic somewhat, but it did not alleviate the anxiety she felt about the risk she was now taking. Pierce’s words burned in her ears. Don’t approach. Don’t do anything dangerous.

  This isn’t dangerous, she told herself. No one knows who I am.

  Dourado had covered her bases. If someone stopped her, questioned her, she had a solid cover story. She was a flight safety inspector, doing a random spot check to ensure that the helicopter was in compliance with regulations. Since she had the door access code, anyone inside would reason that she must be who she said she was, but in the unlikely event that someone decided to challenge the ruse, a call to the National Civil Aviation Agency would confirm her story.

  As she moved through the reception area, she avoided making eye contact with the room’s only occupant, a woman who was in the middle of a telephone conversation. Dourado glanced down, nervously checking to make sure that her bright blue hair was tucked up under her cap. She had donned the hat and removed most of her facial piercings before leaving her residence. It was not much of a disguise, but subterfuge had never been her original intention. Hopefully, the helicopter’s crew would be in such a hurry to get rid of her that they would not look too closely.

  After the relative security of the hangar building, the rear door that let out onto the tarmac almost stopped her cold. “I can do this.”

  Her heart pounded against her chest. She fixed her gaze on the helicopter, and willed her feet to start moving. As she headed toward the helicopter, she checked the flight status of the Cerberus jet. The information had not been updated, but if the clock was to be trusted, the plane should already have landed. She glanced over at the runway just in time to see an aging A320 with TAM Airlines markings touch down.

  She looked back to the helicopter and realized someone was looking down from the elevated cockpit bubble. The scrutiny felt like a physical attack. She forced herself to look away, but the damage was already done. Her pulse was racing, her breathing so rapid that she was on the verge of hyperventilating.

  “Can I help you?”

  The voice startled her. She looked up saw another man standing near the nose of the aircraft. He wore olive drab flight coveralls, the kind that could be purchased from almost any military surplus retailer.

  She worked her mouth, trying to form the short sentence she had rehearsed, but all that came out was a feeble stutter. “Safe…safe…safety inspect…in…spec…”

  The man stared back patiently, and then nodded in understanding. He reached into a pocket and drew out a folded piece of paper which he extended to her. “Everything is in order.”

  Not paper, she now realized. Money.

  A hundred-real banknote. The man was offering her a bribe.

  This was something she had not anticipated. Strangely, this unexpected development had the equally unexpected side effect of shocking her out of her panic. Her heart grew calm, her breathing returned to normal and perhaps most importantly, her ability to think rationally switched back on.

  She shook her head, and in a calm clear voice, she said, “I need to get a serial number from your fire extinguisher. It will only take a minute.”

  The man frowned, as if trying to decide whether to offer a larger bribe or simply comply with her request. After a moment, he turned and slid back the side hatch. “Be my guest.”

  Dourado climbed inside the Sikorsky and looked around. The rear of the cabin behind the passenger seating area was filled with cargo containers and cardboard boxes. The containers had been stacked up to within eight-inches of the ceiling, and they were secured in place by a cargo net that stretched between grommets in the floor and walls. Supplies. For an expedition, perhaps?

  She stifled her curiosity and focused on accomplishing the task she had set for herself. “Where are the fire extinguishers?” she asked, only to discover that the crewman was no longer there. She turned to find him walking across the tarmac in the direction of a small jet aircraft that was taxiing toward the hangar. The Cerberus plane had arrived.

  Dourado looked away quickly. She was nearly out of time, and yet instead of triggering a panic attack, the ticking clock only served to further sharpen her focus.

  “I can do this,” she told herself again, and this time, she actually believed it. What she was attempting was not much different than hacking a secure server. The only difference was that she was doing it in the real world.

  It took just a few seconds for her to compose a brief e-mail with a link to a phone-finder app and instructions on how to use it. She hit send, and after a surreptitious look around to make sure that she was still unobserved, she slipped the phone into one of the boxes. It would be found eventually, but not until the helicopter reached its final destination.

  She returned to the open hatch and peered out. The Learjet had pulled into the empty hangar, and its side hatch was deployed. The crewman stood at the base of the fold-down steps, waiting to greet disembarking passenger
s.

  Dourado held her breath, but in anticipation rather than anxiety. Strangely, she was not the least bit fearful now.

  She easily recognized the first man off the plane. He looked a little older than the most recent photographs she had found, but it was unmistakably Liam Kenner. That single revelation made everything she had risked and endured worthwhile. If Kenner was here, then whatever he was looking for was also here, somewhere nearby, or at least somewhere that could be reached only by helicopter from Belem. The link she had sent to Pierce would allow them to pinpoint that final destination, and finally give them an advantage in the battle with Cerberus.

  The next passenger off the plane was likewise unmistakable. Though she had never seen him before, the big brutish looking man matched Fiona’s description of Kenner’s hired muscle, Vigor Rohn. Kenner and Rohn began conversing with the crewman from the helicopter, gesturing excitedly toward the aircraft, no doubt discussing the particulars of the impending next leg of their travels.

  Time to go, Dourado thought.

  It was a basic rule of hacking. Always be long gone before anyone realized something had happened. She could walk right by Kenner and Rohn without fear of being recognized. If they inquired about her, the crewman would be able to vouch for her, but the longer she waited, the more suspicious her presence would become to them.

  I need to go.

  Yet, she did not move. Her eyes remained fixed on the open hatch in the side of the Learjet. Someone else was coming out, three people—two large men, both cut from the same cloth as Rohn. Bracketed between them was a woman with long black hair.

  Augustina Gallo.

  That was what she had been waiting for, hoping for. And now I really, really have to go.

  Still, she did not move.

  She had visual confirmation that Gallo was alive and a hostage. She had established that Kenner and Rohn were bound for some destination in the Amazon. She had even managed to find a way to track the helicopter so Pierce would be able to follow when he arrived in Brazil. Realistically, there was nothing more she could do.