Implant Page 13

  “Sarah Redd?” For the first time Jonas looked nervous. “I was thinking about Anton Markov. This is his patient.”

  “Of course, and Anton is my boss. He knows I’m here, but he’s not the one who sent me. I’m under personal orders of Sarah Redd.”

  This was, in fact, the complete opposite of the truth. But this little worm would never know that.

  “Well, move it, then,” she said when he continued to hesitate. “Either call or open the damn door.”

  “I can’t take responsibility,” he said. It was astonishing how quickly his tone had become groveling now that she’d shown some backbone. “Of course not. Why would anyone expect you to take responsibility? You’re just a functionary. I’m the specialist in charge of Westhelle’s care. Now open the door.”

  #

  Ian rolled over on his cot as Julia entered his cell. She took a single step in, then stopped. Two men stood directly behind her in the hallway, shotguns lowered in Ian’s direction.

  She fought down her fear, remembering the way he’d jumped her last time. But this time he looked more approachable, even eager to see her.

  “Can we talk?” Julia asked.

  “It would help if the guards lowered their weapons.”

  She took another step into the room. “I know, they act like you’re going to eat my brains or something.”

  Ian chuckled dryly. “That might be exactly what they worry about around here. Are they going to drag me out again?”

  “They’ll have to take me down first.” She looked back at the guards. “Keep your distance. We’re coming out, walking.”

  Ian climbed slowly to his feet and followed her into the hallway. Jonas shrank against the wall as the two walked toward the examination room.

  “Please don’t disturb us, Dr. Jonas,” Julia said. “And I won’t need your security detail, either.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Julia said after they’d retired to the examination room and she’d told Ian why she’d returned to the facility. “Except that my husband either told Sarah or she told him.”

  Ian was sitting on the examination table, not strapped down. The guards were in the hallway. She waved a probe over his head, made contact, then entered the password into her laptop to download data.

  “Information only flows one way,” Ian said. “Upstream. That means your husband figured out what you were up to and informed his superiors.”

  “But how did Terrance know?” she asked. “I told him I was going to Denver for a conference and kept my tickets and my itinerary private. He wasn’t paying attention, he never is.”

  “He didn’t look like he was paying attention. That only means your husband is a good agent.”

  “ He’s not a field agent,” she said. “He has a desk job.”

  “Don’t underestimate him. I don’t care what he does now, he has field agent written all over him. He noticed you were acting funny, probably figured you didn’t intend to leave it alone and when you rushed off to this conference, he got suspicious.”

  Julia paused. Could it really be true that Terrance had a whole previous career he had never told her about? She wasn’t sure about anything when it came to Terrance, not any more.

  “Maybe, but why tell Sarah? I mean, if he’d gone to Markov, then Markov would have told him that I was authorized to visit you.”

  “Unless your husband and Sarah Redd had already agreed to bypass normal channels, if they’re working something else on the side.”

  “Why would they do that?” Julia stepped back from the computer with a frown. The system wasn’t letting her in. “I can see the implant just fine, but I can’t make a connection. Here, let me try something else.”

  “I don’t know, but it’s clear there’s a massive screwup in this project. Things went wrong and now someone wants to cover it up. Could Terrance be involved?”

  “My husband and I have had our problems, but he’d never do something like that.” She no longer felt a hundred percent certain about that. Then, more vehemently, “No, he’d never do that.”

  “Sorry, I’m sure you’re right.” Ian still looked skeptical.

  “Can you tell me what happened with Kendall?” she asked. She tried once again to run diagnostics on the implant.

  “I think he’s dead.” His voice sounded flat, dead.

  “They said you killed him.”

  “They did?”

  Julia nodded. “They said you had a psychotic break, killed Kendall, and tried to cut his implant out with a knife.”

  “Liars.”

  “Did you have a psychotic episode? Is there a chance—”

  Ian cut her off. “No chance, no way. I was perfectly lucid through the whole incident, including when the Namibians took me prisoner. I thought they were Blackwing contractors, and expended all my ammunition while holed up under a burned out APC. They trussed me up and threw me in the back of a truck, and next thing I know—wait a second.” He looked away for a moment. “One of the guards stuck me with something. Knocked me out. I woke up in some shithole a few days later. I remember seeing you there…”

  Julia remembered his look of recognition in his cell in Windhoek, his pleading eyes, the sense of desperation. A chill swept over her and she shook it off. Ian continued, “After that it’s all fuzzy until I came out of it a few days ago.”

  “If you didn’t kill Kendall, who did?”

  “I think it was a C-130 gunship. One of our guys...” He trailed off. “I never actually saw Kendall’s body.”

  Briefly, he told her about the infiltration of the desert camp, how someone had fed him instructions through the implant, then about the battle, how the gunship had first fought off the Blackwing contractors and then turned its guns on their own position.

  “So it was friendly fire? Wow, but didn’t they know where you’d set up the guns?”

  “The CIA had the exact GPS coordinates.”

  “You’d think they’d have communicated that to the guys flying the gunship.”

  “Yeah, you’d think.”

  “But back up a minute,” Julia said. “You said you were getting orders through your implant?”

  “Orders is too weak. More like commands. I didn’t have any choice in the matter, I had to obey. Same thing happened to Kendall.”

  The news made her squirm. “Upgrades.”

  “What?”

  Julia looked over the top of her laptop and met his eyes. “There were some features left out of the design. One feature could inhibit moral judgment under certain circumstances, another could activate pleasure centers of the brain—all this was supposedly for research purposes. And then there was the ability to influence decision making by controlling the prefrontal cortex. The concern was that an agent might go rogue or in other ways need to be recalled.” She shook her head. “But there were too many ethical issues, and I thought they didn’t have the bugs worked out anyway. They decided to stub in the features, but leave them inactive until a future upgrade.”

  “They were fully active, I promise you,” Ian said. “Who could have tampered with the implant like that?”

  “Hubert Chang could, if someone like Sarah or Markov told him to.”

  “That’s the software guy, right? The one with the pickled fetus on his desk?”

  Julia made a face. “Yeah, that’s Chang.”

  “Call it a hunch, but he doesn’t seem to be the sort of guy whose conscience bugs him about things like taking over someone’s brain.” Ian’s expression grew more thoughtful. “I’ve felt it. Here. Today, even. I know the implant’s active. This morning I felt that same sense of vertigo. I don’t know how to describe it. Like there’s someone else in my head.”

  She set the probe down and looked at Ian, her frown deepening. “How? There’s nobody here to send instructions to the implant but me, and I’m sure as hell not doing it. This whole system is messed up anyway. I can see there’s data there, I just can’t read it. I think someone changed the security protocols.”
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  “What does that mean?” Ian sat up and rubbed his head, squinted his eyes shut.

  “You okay?”

  “My brain feels…tight in the skull, that’s the only way to describe it. Almost like the beginning of a headache.”

  “Probably the probe, passing over your head, communicating back and forth.” She tried to get in one more time and then threw up her hands. “Got to be it; they’ve changed the password. I’m locked out. Must be Chang, that jerk. Wait until Markov hears about this.”

  “Except you’ve been recalled, remember? You tell Markov you came back even after Sarah told you not to, and you’ll be in trouble.” He was quiet for a second. “Chances are, Markov is in enough trouble for letting you come in the first place.”

  Her face sagged. She felt defeated. “Then what am I going to do?”

  “You can help me get out of here,” he said.

  “My standing on the team is approaching zero. I can appeal to Markov, but he took a huge risk in sending me in the first place.”

  “He’s a by-the-books guy,” Ian said, “and his fingers will be stinging from the rapping Sarah is going to give him. No, I don’t think he’ll help.”

  “Maybe Terrance…”

  “No offense, Julia, but didn’t you come back because you thought your husband had ratted you?” He looked Julia right in the eyes with an intensity that made her feel exposed. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.”

  She could hardly breathe when she realized what he meant. A twinge of fear clawed at her consciousness. No. She was in over her head already.

  “There’s got to be something I can do,” Julia finally said, ignoring his question.

  Ian backpedaled. “Remember what I said before? You can call my family and friends, tell them what happened and where I am. They can make a stink.”

  She took a deep breath, then nodded. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “It will be ugly after that. You’ll lose your job, maybe worse.”

  “Worse? What do you mean by worse? No, never mind, I don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter. I can’t leave you here to rot.”

  The door swung open before he could answer. It was Jonas, with four guards. The first two had stun guns, the men behind them held shotguns at the ready. All four wore body armor. Ian was sitting on the examination bench and sprang to his feet.

  “Dr. Jonas?” Julia said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Take them down,” Jonas ordered. The men with stun batons pushed past him and into the room. “They are both criminally insane.”

  Chapter Nineteen:

  Sometimes it was necessary to kill for the good of the country. Anton Markov had personally killed eighteen people during his days as a field operative. And not from a distance, either, which was the way America usually handled these things.

  He had stabbed, garroted, shot execution-style, and otherwise killed each and every victim at such a distance that he could remember most by the expressions when they realized they were going to die. There was an Al-Qaeda operative in Lebanon who had died with a look of ecstasy even as Markov’s hands choked the life out of him. It was the look of a martyr. Seventy-two virgins in paradise.

  Even with so much practice, he hated to kill. Of all his victims, surely the most deserving was the wife of the Sudanese ambassador to Ethiopa whose wine he had poisoned. She had personal ties to Janjaweed militia in the Darfur, had authorized and encouraged ethnic cleansing, and personally profited from the death and misery of thousands.

  Markov sat across from the woman at a state dinner while her body started to convulse. She looked across the table, unable to speak, pleading with her eyes for help, while oblivious conversation continued all around. Markov narrowed his eyes and he could see the hard look reflected back at him. She knew, yes, she knew who had killed her. That look of terror still haunted him.

  One thing he had never done was kill someone to erase his own mistake.

  But Sarah Redd wasn’t Anton Markov.

  She hung up the phone after talking to a certain Dr. Jonas at the CIA-run asylum in Nephi, Utah and turned to Markov with a shrug. “That’s it, then. Jonas will take her into custody and our problem will disappear.”

  “Disappear how, incarcerate her indefinitely?” Markov asked. “That facility is for criminally dangerous patients, not to erase inconvenient blunders. And Julia Nolan has coworkers, family, friends and former colleagues. They’ll want to know what happened to her. Officially, that facility doesn’t even exist.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?”

  “So you’re serious,” he said. “I can’t believe it, you really are.”

  Sarah had summoned Markov to a CIA office opposite the Capitol Building. It had a smoked glass window with a view that stretched the length of the Mall. Close to all centers of power, Markov had no doubt that its location figured prominently in Directive 17, the CIA’s covert plan to take control of the U.S. government in case of an “extraordinary emergency situation.”

  Sarah sighed. “As far as we’re concerned, Anton, we’ve only given orders to bring her into custody. But Dr. Nolan has become a liability. She knows too much to simply lose her job, and has proven herself incapable of following orders, even when national security is on the line. Her judgment has become erratic. She’s not mentally stable. And Dr. Jonas feels the same way.”

  There had to be a way to get out of this that didn’t involve violating direct orders from the Director of National Intelligence. The mistake Sarah was going to erase was, after all, Markov’s. He had sent her to Utah, complicit in her investigation. Oddly, Sarah had not reprimanded him in any way and he no longer thought she would. Not at the moment, anyway. What better leverage to control him with, not just now, but for years to come.

  Markov knew perfectly well that the Defense Inpatient Psychiatric and Surgical Hospital, DIPSHIT to the few individuals who knew it existed, was a one-way ticket. It had been created following Vietnam as the defense department came to grips with a number of cases of severe mental illness among those with top secret security clearances, where treatment in a conventional psychiatric ward like Walter Reed was too great a security risk. Although DIPSHIT technically had facilities for both medical and surgical care, for all practical purposes it was a long-term psychiatric ward. As one Senator had put it in the oversight hearings, “There’s got to be someplace to put people who go batshit crazy but know more of our secrets than the Russians.”

  “What about her husband?” Markov asked. “He’s going to want to see her.”

  “You let me take care of that,” she said. “Terrance will probably be relieved. Their marriage is in the toilet already, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not qualified to comment on the strength of their marriage. I’m often surprised, however, by how people react to external threats against friends and family.”

  “God, you sound like a formal memo every time you open your mouth.” Sarah leaned back in her chair behind a massive mahogany desk. Her chair was higher than Markov’s on the other side, for effect. “Does that mean you think he’ll freak out?”

  “How could I know what he’ll do?”

  “You do, don’t you? You think Terrance will do something stupid and then we’ll all get in trouble or at the very least, we’ll have one more mess to clean up. Well, if he does, I’ve got leverage. He’ll stay in line.”

  Markov tried a different tactic. “People will know. Chang will know; whoever you hire to replace Dr. Nolan will hear rumors. Eliminating a valuable asset for an infraction—”

  “Infraction? She violated direct orders, entered a top-secret facility under false pretenses and may or may not be attempting to free a dangerous criminal from incarceration.”

  “Then take her into custody and question her. Charge her formally. As far as we know she doesn’t know anything about Ian’s mission. I don’t understand what security risk she poses that calls for this kind of response.”

 
“And you think that would work?”

  “Yes, I do,” Markov lied. He saw little evidence Julia would respond to threats. His mind was racing now. This was it. This was how big mistakes were made, and he had no options and no time. Opposing Sarah was political suicide. Complying meant he was part of a cover-up that left him compromised, vulnerable, for the rest of his career. And for what?

  What if Ian Westhelle died in a tragic accident? He really was a murderer, after all—could that be enough to keep Julia from…? He needed allies. Where would CIA Director Price take this? Almost certainly back up Sarah. She’d practically appointed him herself. Maybe Deputy Director Nelson? He was a good man, but there was no time to prepare. Markov had to make a decision. Here. Alone.

  Sarah started to say something, but the phone on her desk rang. She picked it up and frowned. “My God, you can’t be serious.”

  #

  The guards’ mistake was attacking Julia first, simply because she stood near the door. They hit her with stun batons and she went down with a cry. She lay twitching on the ground while the two men turned their attention to Ian.

  Everything moved slowly, and Ian could see the entire scene with clarity. The problem was the men with shotguns, not the two with stun guns. They’d already proven to be stupid by attacking Julia, obviously harmless. Stupid and slow.

  One of the men with shotguns held his weapon casually. He did not expect to use it. The other stood at a semi-crouch with the shotgun at the ready, but Dr. Jonas, eager to be in the thick of the action, stood between Ian and the guard’s weapon. The Benelli shotguns were absolutely lethal in close quarters, but had no penetrative power.

  Ian grabbed Julia’s closed laptop, while his foot hooked the examination table and swung it around on its wheels. The table knocked into the guards with stun guns, pinned them in the corner. One tripped backwards over Julia’s prostrate, twitching body. The other tried to wrestle the bed out of the way, but Ian’s foot blocked the wheel and the man was off-balance, unable to get leverage.