The Entity Game: An Aurora Donati Novel

by Lisa Shearin

  Marshall flashed a smile of his own. “See? He’s glad to see me.”

  Berta shook her head. “This just keeps getting stranger.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The cabin was rustic inside and out.

  Except for the bank of computer screens showing what I assumed was every approach to the cabin.

  David Barrington had lost weight since the photo on Julian’s study wall had been taken last fall. Though if I was hiding from a psychokinetic assassin in a log cabin fortress a hundred miles from the Canadian border in the middle of winter, I’d probably be a shadow of my former self, too.

  Rees was looking around. “Impressive.”

  “The owner likes his privacy,” Barrington said.

  Dr. David Barrington had had an unexpected reaction when he saw Marshall.

  He’d relaxed. Not just a slight easing of tension. We’re talking total relief, as if Gabriel Marshall was an angel sent by God himself. For a moment there, I thought Barrington was going to hug him.

  I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone this glad to see me,” Marshall said.

  “You don’t know how good it is to see someone I can trust.”

  Marshall didn’t need to say, “I told you so.” The smug grin he tossed Berta said it for him.

  She snorted. “All that means is Hell’s in the process of freezing over.”

  The only sources of light were two oil lamps—and the wall nearly full of surveillance monitors.

  Marshall made the introductions, and you bet I shook David Barrington’s hand.

  For all his relief, Barrington was terrified, giving off waves of adrenaline like a cornered animal. Despite being nearly giddy to see Gabriel Marshall, he felt utterly alone, had no idea what he was going to do or where to go next. Would he be killed, or arrested and taken back to Washington as a traitor? He knew his career was in tatters; his life, for all intents and purposes, was over.

  I felt sorry for him and wanted to deck him at the same time. What he had to say for himself in the next few minutes would determine which impulse I gave in to.

  Marshall was checking out what I could only describe as the security command center. “Carter really values his family’s privacy. He’s got cameras, motion sensors, and body heat detectors in a hundred-yard perimeter around the cabin.”

  “It’s powered from a solar array at the top of the ridge behind us,” Barrington told him. “Carter can monitor it from home back in Alexandria. When he installed all this, he borrowed a tiny piece of real estate on a CIA satellite.”

  Holy crap.

  “Is he monitoring it now?” Marshall asked.

  “Yes. Thank God. It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane.”

  “How much do you know about what’s happened?”

  Barrington took a ragged breath. “Julian and Alan are dead. Mark Dalton, too.”

  I wanted to throw the blame for Grandad at his feet, but I held my tongue. Barrington might trust Marshall, but I sure as hell didn’t trust Barrington. We didn’t know how much of this was his fault, and until we did, I’d ask questions, but I wasn’t going to answer any from him.

  “When you turned me down,” Barrington continued, “I should have refused to go further with the project right then. I knew you were the only possible choice.”

  “Except I don’t want an implant in my head and to be ordered around the world killing every dictator who pisses off the US—or just Langley. That’s not what I do.”

  “You know about Elias?”

  “Just that he’s who you went with instead of me.”

  “His PK was off the charts, like yours, and his CIA service record was impeccable.”

  “That’s when you should’ve gotten suspicious. No one’s record is that clean.”

  “Barton recommended him, and I trusted Barton.” His expression darkened. “At least I did. It was either accept Elias into the project or shut it down. The human mind is the greatest unexplored and undeveloped frontier. I believe the next step in human evolution is the expansion of the brain’s capabilities, and now is the time to take that step. The Entity Project isn’t the direction I would have chosen, but it fills a critical need. There are too many madmen with their fingers on nuclear buttons. I couldn’t afford to wait. The world couldn’t wait. We’d come too far with the project. We were so close.”

  “To creating a psychic assassin,” Rees said.

  “There is so much evil in this world, Special Agent Rees. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “We do seem to have had more than our fair share lately.”

  “Throughout history, every country has used assassins. I’m not an advocate of murder, but consider the multiple assassination attempts against Adolph Hitler. Think of the millions of lives that could have been saved by the elimination of just one man. More than seventy years after his death, the evil he spawned is still spreading. With the Entity Project wars could be prevented before they started. No country would be blamed for what would be believed to be a natural death. No nuclear retaliation. No terrorist attacks. Wars averted. Peace, Agent Rees. I just wanted to give the world peace.”

  “Except your avenging angel turned out to be the fallen variety,” Marshall said, his voice clipped and hard.

  “He was the only candidate with the level of existing skill to allow it to work. Except for you.”

  Skill. David Barrington believed it was a skill to murder and have no one trace it back to you. I could see where his passion was coming from. In an ideal world, Elias Halverson wouldn’t have gone rogue. But thinking about Grandad lying in that hospital bed…It was all I could do not to go after Barrington with my bare hands. I went to the monitors and kept watch for any movement. HAL would know before I would. Still, it gave me something to do besides pound the crap out of David Barrington.

  Marshall wasn’t doing much better in the self-control department. I could feel it coming off him in waves. Professionalism prevailed. For now.

  “And you thought you could control him,” Marshall said. “You’re playing God, but all you’ve done is create a monster, and now it’s turned on you. What can he do besides cardiac arrests and aneurysms?”

  “That’s it for now.”

  “For now?”

  “For older subjects he would use cardiac arrest, younger would be aneurysms. If a subject had a particular health problem, Elias could work on customizing his method.”

  Subject? Customize his method?

  That did it.

  “Your monster killed my grandfather.” I felt myself losing the last bit of control I had. I hadn’t given in to my grief in the hospital. I’d kept it inside. Listening to David Barrington had twisted it into rage, and that rage was coming out. I had the man responsible right in front of me. “If Rees and I hadn’t been there with him when Elias used his ‘skill’ to stop Grandad’s heart, he would have stayed dead. He’s in ICCU, hooked up to machines, and we don’t know if he’s going to live or die.” My voice dropped to a hissing whisper. “If he dies, you had better hope whoever is hunting you gets to you before I do.” I quickly turned and went to the other side of the small room. I couldn’t trust myself not to go after Barrington now.

  “Her grandfather is Ambrose Donati,” I heard Rees saying as I tried to get myself back under control. “The two of them are consulting detectives for the FBI. Julian Pierce was a very good friend of Ambrose, and he and Aurora are helping us find his killer. Elias Halverson felt threatened and induced a cardiac arrest in Mr. Donati on the doorstep of his home.” Rees’s voice went dangerously quiet. “He is eighty-two years old.”

  Barrington collapsed into the computer chair, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “Oh God. God, I’m so sorry.”

  His horror and regret were sincere, but I didn’t want either one. Neither would heal Grandad.

  “I don’t want your apology,” I spat. “I want to know where this thing yo
u’ve created has gone to ground.”

  Rees pulled up a chair close to Barrington. “Where is Elias, Dr. Barrington? I assume he killed Pierce, Coe, and Dalton out of self-preservation, to protect the project and its mission. He attacked Ambrose Donati for the same reason. What is that mission?”

  “I don’t know. I warned Julian about him,” Barrington said. “I don’t know how Mark Dalton found out there was a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “There’s a stability problem with the implant.”

  “The implant is defective?” Marshall asked. “Or is Elias Halverson unstable?”

  “Or did the implant make him that way?” I added.

  “The implant is a booster,” Barrington said. “A battery, if you will, to enhance Elias’s psychokinetic ability. It should have had no effect on his mental stability.”

  Marshall crouched on the floor in front of Barrington, putting them eye to eye. “But it did, didn’t it?”

  Barrington took a breath and shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. Before the operation, he was level-headed, sociable, all his psychological testing came back normal, well within acceptable parameters. He was a perfect candidate for the project. After the surgery, he learned to work with the implant, trained with it. We had anatomic models for him to use. They were made of materials of the same density and texture of a human body. The hearts were wired to beat. He was proud of his progress, but not in a way that raised concern. It was only after he began working with the pigs that…”

  “He liked it,” I said. “He enjoyed the killing, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Rees leaned forward. “What is his mission?”

  “He’s supposed to be deployed overseas; that’s all I know.”

  “What made you contact Julian Pierce?”

  “Last week, Barton told me my part was over. I said it was too soon. Elias needed more observation. Barton told me not to worry about Elias, and that he would take it from there.”

  Berta huffed a laugh. “That’s when you knew you really needed to worry.”

  “Barton also wanted to expand the project beyond Elias. I told him I disagreed. We didn’t know the implant’s long-term effects. Barton seemed to accept it, but on Tuesday morning, the three backup implants and batteries I had made were missing from the safe in the lab’s clean room.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “Three implants? Renwick can make three more assassins?”

  “No. Not without me. I’m the only one who can do the surgery.” He paused. “Though Barton did assist me with Elias’s implant.”

  Wonderful.

  Barrington took a deep breath and it all came out. “Soon after the project began, Barton assured me we were fully funded. I asked Julian how much the committee had allocated for the project.” He paused. “It wasn’t anywhere near as much as we needed. But Barton had provided everything I’d asked for, without question.”

  “So, Barton had gone shopping for investors.” Marshall’s eyes were hard, relentless.

  “That’s what Julian and I thought. Last year, Barton took his family to Europe on their annual vacation. I remembered his wife telling me about their trip to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest. She said Barton only had only a few business meetings this time, so it hadn’t ruined the family’s fun.”

  This time.

  “Let me guess,” Marshall said, “when he came back, not only was the project suddenly flush with cash, but he had a recommendation for a replacement for me.”

  “Yes. Barton called the lab late Tuesday morning and told me he wanted my notes on the Entity Project. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d taken the implants. I told him it’d take a couple days to get the notes together. I tried calling Julian, but couldn’t reach him until Wednesday. He told me to come here.”

  And several hours after that, Senator Julian Pierce and Alan Coe were dead.

  Barrington put his face in his hands. “I’ve known Barton my entire medical career. He was like a brother to me.”

  Said Abel about Cain.

  “Where are your notes?” Marshall asked.

  “I destroyed them.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  “Why didn’t you call the CIA?”

  “I didn’t know who I could trust.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” Marshall said smoothly. “Sam, we need to find Barton Renwick. Now.”

  CHAPTER 32

  “Perimeter breach in multiple sectors—”

  The front window shattered, and a bullet slammed into the server cabinet, silencing HAL mid warning.

  Rees dragged Barrington off the chair and onto the floor.

  Shots continued and sparks flew as Carter Perry’s home security network was destroyed.

  “Where are your men?” Marshall shouted to Rees over the gunfire.

  Berta returned fire out the shattered window. “They’re out there.”

  She was right. It sounded like a small war outside. With HAL permanently out of commission, we had no clue how many were out there, or where. Our team of four was up against an unknown number.

  “Comms are out,” Rees said. “We’re being jammed.”

  A tear gas canister flew past Berta and landed in front of the fireplace.

  Rees jerked Barrington’s collar. “Is there another way out?”

  The doctor lifted the rug next to the computer chair, revealing a trap door. “This goes to the basement. There’s a door on the north wall.” He started to cough. “Mining tunnel. . . goes up to the ridge.”

  Marshall made a grabbing and throwing motion with his hand, and the canister that was nearly ten feet away went flying out the way it came. Berta and Marshall grabbed their duffels as we scrambled down the stairs, but there was no way to put the rug back over the trapdoor. If they had to look for our escape hatch, we might gain a few critical seconds.

  I grabbed Marshall’s arm. “Can you put—”

  “PK the rug back and tidy up a bit?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “I’m insulted you had to ask.”

  Berta looked up at the now closed trapdoor. “Is there anything to block this with?”

  Barrington quickly ran a hand around the doorframe. “There’s supposed to be a deadbolt—”

  “Found it.” Berta pulled the bolt and locked the door from our side.

  I heard the computer chair rolling as Marshall used his PK to not only replace the rug, but put the chair on top of it, hopefully hiding our exit, or at least buying us more time to escape.

  Barrington was at the back wall, lifting the bar hooked across a low door. Rees pulled him back as Berta opened it, shining her gun-mounted light into the tunnel beyond, then plunging inside. “If it’s not clear I’ll make it clear.”

  Rees and Barrington followed, with me and Marshall bringing up the rear.

  Barrington stopped. “There’s a bar on this side, too.” He found the bar behind the door and fitted it into hooks mounted on either side of the doorframe.

  “What kind of family does Carter Perry have?” I asked.

  Marshall flashed a grin. “Typical multigenerational CIA family.”

  We moved quickly as we could, considering the rocks underfoot and the unlevel tunnel floor. The tunnel was definitely manmade. Barrington had said it was a mine tunnel, yet there were no intersecting tunnels, just the one we were in that continued to go up and hopefully out.

  I dropped back to where Marshall was bringing up the rear. “What if we have company waiting for us up top?”

  “Between me and Berta, we’ve got enough ammo to start our own war.”

  “I just want to finish the one we’ve got.”

  “I aim to please, ma’am. Hopefully Rees’s people called for backup when they got ambushed.”

  “Unless their comms are jammed, too.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a ton of fun a
t parties.”

  “I don’t like parties.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Too many people with too many emotions isn’t my idea of a good time.” Talking was helping to calm my nerves, so I kept doing it. “So, what can you do with your PK?”

  “I can’t stop human organs from working, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “I wasn’t, but thanks for getting that out of the way.”

  “You believe me?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been around you enough to get a good read. I know when you’re lying.”

  “Have I been?”

  “No, but you haven’t told us the whole truth, either.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a ton of fun in relationships, too,” he said, deftly shifting the topic from him to me.

  “They’re not fun for me, either.” I turned away and picked up the pace, leaving Marshall behind.

  When I had prolonged contact with someone, I found out way too much. Sex increased that knowledge a hundredfold. We all have fantasies, and some of them we’d rather not share with anyone, regardless of how close the relationship. Sex released more than inhibitions; it released the fantasies. When the body lost its inhibitions, so did the subconscious.

  Normally, a couple was together for a while before they started sharing that which possibly should not be shared. I got it all during the first kiss with the surge of hormones, or if the guy had exceptional self-control, during foreplay. I saw what he wanted to see, what he imagined himself doing—and with, or to, whom.

  It was distracting to say the least; and at worst, I couldn’t turn it off, which made it next to impossible to get turned on. For me, TMI took on a whole new meaning.

  “I can get a beer out of the fridge and never leave the couch,” Marshall said quietly.

  I glanced back at him. Marshall’s gaze was searching my face, not intently, but trying to assess my mood. He knew he’d crossed a line and he sincerely wanted to make up for it.

  Sincerity.

  Not something I would’ve associated with Gabriel Marshall.

  He’d made an effort; so could I.

  “Can you make a plate of nachos from the couch?” I asked.