“Going out?”
Mark grinned at him. “That’s part of the plan.”
“Without your security detail?”
“And that’s the other part,” Heather finished in a tone that made clear she wasn’t in the mood to justify her decision.
Jack looked from one to the other, his gaze taking in Heather’s black dress, her matching evening jacket, and Mark’s slate-gray suit.
“We’ll stay out of sight.”
“No.”
“Just me then.”
“You and Janet take the night off,” Mark said, opening his suit jacket just enough to reveal the holstered Glock. “We’re not exactly helpless.”
Heather knew Mark’s last comment was unnecessary. Having trained and seen them in action, Jack was very familiar with how deadly they could be when the situation called for violence. And he was also aware of their periodic need to escape the security umbrella they tolerated most of the time. Whenever that need arose, the outcome wasn’t negotiable. Jack didn’t have to like it, but he did have to accept it.
Jack’s brown eyes glittered with that strange reflection that sometimes filled his pupils. He nodded and stepped aside to let them pass.
The lobby doors slid open as the two approached, letting them step outside where their armored Mercedes waited beneath the curved building overhang. A gust of cold, mid-December wind swirled around them, and Heather hurried to slide into the passenger seat as Mark held the door open for her, a sweet, out-of-style courtesy. Heather accepted it graciously.
He climbed into the driver’s seat, closed his door, and spoke the command that put the Mercedes in motion toward the Sea Market Grill. As they passed through the outer security gate, Heather felt a great weight had lifted from her shoulders.
For tonight at least, they were free.
Freddy Hagerman entered his two-story Watergate East apartment, threw his overcoat in the general direction of the coatrack, and headed for the liquor cabinet, knowing all too well the magnitude of his failure. Despite using a variety of parliamentary maneuvers to keep the Senate in session well past midnight, he hadn’t been able to round up enough votes to stop the action President Benton’s Senate supporters would undertake tomorrow.
What had happened to this precious institution? The founders had intended it to be the deliberative body, populated by thoughtful people with the capacity to think and debate all aspects of important decisions rather than ramming through whatever the head of the executive branch wanted. That was especially true for international treaties.
But after bypassing the Foreign Relations Committee and with only two weeks of debate, the Senate leadership would submit the treaty that would cede U.S. sovereignty to the UFNS to a vote on the Senate floor. The lengthy session that had just ended left no doubt how that vote would turn out. Freddy wanted to cry. Instead, he filled a glass with clinking ice cubes, grabbed the almost-full bottle of single-malt Scotch, and carried both over to his leather reading chair.
He settled himself into it, filled the glass with the amber liquid, and leaned back to prop his artificial left leg on the footstool. For several seconds he just sat there, staring blankly at the dark television screen mounted on the opposite wall. Without taking a drink, he set the glass on the small table, hiked up his pants leg, and removed his walking leg and other shoe. His right foot hurt, but that was nothing compared to the throbbing from the stump of his left thigh.
Lifting his glass, he raised it to his lips, paused to inhale the strong scent of the whisky, and drained it, the ice-cold liquid leaving a trail of fire down his throat and into his gut. No doubt his ex-wives wouldn’t approve of this kind of drinking. Holding that thought, he poured himself another.
The last night of American independence deserved no less.
Jack Gregory awoke from a dream he could not quite remember. He had opened his eyes to the predawn darkness, deeply troubled. He felt certain the dream was connected to the Bolivian temple called Kalasasaya, the place where the Altreian entity known as Khal Teth had almost stolen his sanity. The place where Janet had once lost faith in him.
Beside him, Janet slept peacefully, one bare thigh dimly visible where it extended beyond the blankets. He rolled toward her, placing a hand softly on that thigh, not to wake her, just to enjoy the feel of her. All these years she’d been his partner. The first female to graduate Ranger School, she was the deadliest woman he’d ever met, one who loved the adrenaline rush of danger as much as he did.
He had never asked her to do it, but over these last several years, she had given up much of the fieldwork she loved in order to keep Robby safe. Her training had not suffered. She drove herself harder than ever. But he could see how her self-sacrifice wore on her. As he looked at her beautiful face, he hoped that she would soon realize that Robby was ready to be given a player’s role in the mission Heather envisioned for him. Maybe then Janet could release the mama-bear role and take her life back.
Careful not to disturb Janet, he slipped from the bed, shrugged into his white Turkish bathrobe, and walked barefoot to the kitchen, his footsteps barely audible on the travertine tile floor. With a gentle swiping motion on the wall panel, he brought the lights up softly. Right now he wanted to sit in the great room with a steaming mug of coffee and let his subconscious mind bring the dream memory back to him.
Inserting a coffee pod into the single-cup brewer, Jack filled his mug, walked to the transparent titanium wall, and looked out toward the eastern horizon that was just beginning to show the first hints of dawn.
“Hi, Dad.”
Hearing Robby’s voice, Jack turned to see his son standing behind him wearing jeans, sneakers, and an orange T-shirt. Robby moved so silently that even Jack didn’t hear him approach. No surprise, but Jack still found it disconcerting.
“Good morning.” Jack smiled and hugged his son, who returned the embrace. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a log.”
The line was one of their running jokes. They both knew that Robby didn’t sleep any more than logs did.
“You’re worried about something.” Robby’s statement carried all the certainty of his enhanced perception and intellect. Jack didn’t bother to dispute it.
“It was just a dream I can’t remember. Bugs me.”
Robby turned to look through the wall at the glow that tinged the distant clouds, standing beside his dad like a smaller man.
“Mom thinks I’m not ready for what’s coming.”
“She’s a mama bear and she loves you.”
Robby looked up at him with those remarkably bright eyes. “I’m getting stronger every day.”
His words brought an involuntary shiver to Jack. He knew what Robby meant. The boy wasn’t just getting stronger physically, he was getting better at everything, advancing at a pace that even Heather found startling. A week ago he’d beaten her at chess. Although he hadn’t managed to do it again, the amazing feat had led Heather to whisper in Jack’s ear, “He’s ready.”
Jack agreed with her assessment and soon Janet would too. Maybe she already did but was just too scared to admit it, even to herself. They both knew what that admission would mean—the end of childhood, that precious something that had been stolen from him and Janet very early in their own lives.
As Jack looked out at the red dawn, he couldn’t escape the feeling that, very soon now, this world would be needing the exceptional talents his son had to offer.
Jack Gregory’s voice on the intercom brought Heather out of her yoga pose. Across the exercise room, she saw Mark lower the Olympic barbell onto its bench rest with a loud thump that shook the matted rubber floor.
“We’ve got a line of FBI vehicles coming through the main gate and three helicopter gunships circling overhead. Our gate guards have just been placed under arrest.”
The vision that filled Heather’s mind was a familiar one. Her response had no hesitation.
“Send the security staff outside to surrender, then seal the building
and take your family down to the lower level.”
“Janet is already on her way down there with Robby and Yachay. I’m coming for you two.”
“No. Link up with Janet, Robby, and Yachay and wait for us down in the command center. Mark and I will be along shortly, just as we planned.”
She heard the growl in Jack’s voice. “You know I never liked that part of the plan.”
“I know. See you in five minutes.”
She heard the intercom go dead and knew that Jack had complied. Heather rose to her feet and met Mark at the door. As many times as she’d played out this scenario in her mind, she hadn’t visualized the inevitable FBI raid happening this soon. Hopefully that would be the extent of what she got wrong. The probability calculations that flashed through her mind weren’t reassuring.
Moving back to their bedroom, Heather shrugged into her shoulder holster as Mark did the same. Then, grabbing their go bags, they walked rapidly to the elevators. By the time they reached the first-floor security lobby, the first of the armored FBI vehicles screeched to a stop outside the headquarters’ entrance. The Special Weapons and Tactics team formed an assault line along a transparent wall as other agents cuffed six security guards and hustled them into two vans.
Heather walked to the wall-mounted control panel and typed in the code that would play and repeat a video embedded on the outer surface of the headquarters dome. Her recorded voice thundered from an array of mounted speakers.
“Hello. As you probably know, I am Heather Smythe. My husband Mark and I welcome you to our Combinatorics Technology Corporation headquarters. Please put away your weapons, as they will not be needed. Our attorneys are on their way here to negotiate the terms of our surrender. We look forward to the opportunity to present our case before the American people.”
The change that came over the entire FBI unit was startling to behold. One second they looked ready for an all-out assault and the next, the agents stood transfixed, staring up at the huge images of Heather, repeated in hundreds of twenty-foot-tall tiled displays, visible from all directions. The press helicopters were in for one hell of a show.
Unless the FBI had brought some heavy demolitions capability that she wasn’t seeing right now, they weren’t getting through the reinforced titanium walls and doors anytime soon.
“You done watching the spectacle?” Mark’s voice brought her out of the vision she’d just slipped into.
“Yes,” she said, turning toward the elevator that would take them down to the underground level. “Time to go.”
As she watched Mark enter the appropriate code and then press his hand to the scanner, a premonition raised gooseflesh on her arms. Long before this new journey’s end, they’d all be bathed in blood.
Three hundred feet belowground, Janet led Robby along the hallway that separated the CTC laboratories, training facilities, and command center from each other, thankful that, for once, he wasn’t arguing with her. Dressed in jeans, boots, a black turtleneck, her utility vest, and a leather jacket, she had a Glock 17 holstered at the small of her back and a black Gerber Guardian dagger in an inverted sheath along her right side. She had placed six extra magazines in the pockets of her utility vest, with more in the canvas kit bag slung over her shoulder.
Yachay walked silently behind them in her traditional Quechuan attire, colorful clothing that Janet knew hid a Glock and one very large knife.
Just as they reached the door that barred entrance to the command center, Janet heard the echo of footsteps from behind and turned to see Jack jogging down the long hallway toward them, carrying a kit bag of his own.
“I take it you couldn’t talk Heather out of it,” she said.
“Had to try.”
“It’s those damn visions of hers.”
“She’s wasting time on theater.”
Janet shrugged. “She’s the best there is.”
“No doubt about that. But this time she might be trying to see a little too deep into that crystal ball of hers.”
Turning to the wall, Janet placed her palm on the scanner and waited two seconds before the door whisked open, allowing them entrance into the room that Heather and Mark had modeled after the Altreian starship’s command bay. Janet stepped into the room, followed closely by Robby, Yachay, and Jack. The door slid closed behind them with a barely audible whisper.
Oddly enough, this room had no inherent functionality. The free-flowing beauty of its gently curving surfaces was designed to eliminate distraction from the senses while the users were connected with their headsets, be they the original Altreian variety or the earthly replicas.
Like their alien counterparts, these newer models had been encoded to link to only one of The Enhanced, as she’d come to think of Mark, Heather, and Robby. In fact, there was nothing of significant use to anyone other than The Enhanced in this entire underground facility. The supercomputers and data storage were all located in the secret New Zealand mine, remotely accessible through the subspace receiver-transmitter headsets that only The Enhanced could use. The labs and computer facilities on this level contained technologies that CTC had publicly released.
Until today, although he’d worked with Heather on equipment that emulated headset functionality, Robby had never been granted access to this room. Janet looked down at the joyous expression of wonder on her son’s face and swallowed hard.
She’d dreaded this moment. The training wheels were coming off.
Robby walked directly to the fourth command couch, paused before it, and looked back at Jack and then at Janet.
“Can I?”
“Yes,” she said, “but not the alien headset . . . not until Heather says.”
With a smile, Robby triggered a hidden button on the armrest, opening the compartment that held the two headsets that were attuned to his mind. Taking out the topmost band, he slid it over his temples and settled onto the couch.
Janet wanted to tell him to take it slow, but the truth was, he’d been training for this moment for almost five years. He knew what the headsets did and how to use them. And since it wouldn’t be easy for the feds to break through the graphene-laced titanium security doors to gain access to the underground level, they still had some time to let Robby get comfortable using the real thing.
Because shortly, they were all going to need a little bit of his talent.
CHAPTER 8
This wormhole jump hadn’t been nearly as bad as the last one. Jennifer had only counted a half dozen broken bones, all of them non-displaced fractures of her ribs, along with some deep bruises, the type of injuries the nanites in her blood healed with ease.
Raul had suffered the worst injury of this transition, a compound fracture to his left arm that had required Jennifer to re-break and set it after the healing process had already begun. His warm blood had splattered her face and into her mouth when she’d pulled the sharp shard of white bone to let it slip back beneath his muscle and skin. But it hadn’t been the acrid taste and smell of her shipmate’s blood that had made her gag. Raul’s screams were the culprit behind that.
The blood had taught them something important. Raul’s healing process had been much slower than the last time, a consequence of his having transferred a large percentage of his nanites to Jennifer. That meant that the little Rho Project nano-machines couldn’t reproduce. That meant that each time a nanited person bled, he lost some of his healing ability. If she and Raul didn’t want that to become an ever-increasing problem, they were going to have to make more of the nanite serum.
Since Dr. Stephenson had reverse engineered the Kasari nanites from those that had been injected into his blood the first time he’d stepped on the Rho Ship, creating more of the serum didn’t pose a huge problem. Technically, Raul and Jennifer wouldn’t even have to duplicate samples taken from their own blood. The Kasari nano-bot design details were all available within the portion of the neural net’s data banks that Dr. Stephenson had never gained access to.
But that idea sent a shudder
through Jennifer’s body. As much as Dr. Stephenson’s nanite formula creeped her out, it had undergone significant human testing, most recently on one Jennifer Smythe. God only knew what the Kasari version might do to them. There was no way she was willing to take that risk.
Unfortunately, Raul had come to the opposite conclusion and was being a real pain in the ass about it.
“Okay, that’s it,” Raul hissed as he finally managed to raise himself into the air with the stasis field. “I’m going to make some of the Kasari nanite serum.”
“Like hell you are! For all we know, that stuff could affect our minds.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
Jennifer felt her blood rising into her temples. She knew she should be more sympathetic to Raul’s ongoing recovery, but this scared the crap out of her.
“Am I? Think about it. Dr. Stephenson was the first one who figured out how to open this ship. He came on board by himself. When he walked off, he was changed. A ruthless genius determined to fulfill the Kasari agenda. What do you think happened to him during that first visit?”
Raul laughed. “Now you’re just dreaming shit up.”
“Screw you.”
Seeing the anger flash in Raul’s human eye, she felt the tendrils of the stasis field close around her. Before it could tighten enough to hurt her, she thrust herself into his mind with savage force, pulling forth his most terrible memories, immersing them both in a series of horrific visions . . . a bedridden Raul wasting away with brain cancer, surrounded by his desperate and grieving parents . . . his agony as his father performed the illegal Rho Project nanite transfusion in the Rodriguez basement . . . Dr. Stephenson’s scalpel digging out his right eyeball . . . the amputation of Raul’s legs and the subsequent attachment of the grotesque umbilical cable to his lower spine.
Raul’s anguished whimper accompanied the relaxation of the stasis field’s grip on her. Five feet away, Raul lay on the floor of the command bay, having curled into a legless fetal ball as tears streamed down his cheek from his tightly shut human eye.
The Kasari Nexus (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 1) Page 10