Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (150 page)

Ian felt the glow of satisfaction, but then came the itching in his brain again, the sense that his head was following his body at a distance. Was the implant active?

________

About twenty minutes after the two men bunked down for the night, Kendall sat up in bed. Ian was on the edge of sleep. He’d wrapped himself tightly into his army blankets. The tent was closed off from the wind, but that didn’t keep the desert chill from seeping in.

Ian rolled over. “What is it?” he whispered.

Kendall rustled with his clothes. “I’m going out.”

“Are you crazy? We’re under curfew.”

“Yeah, why? What’s going on out there that’s so important they don’t want us to see?” He was putting on his shoes now.

“Brother, what the hell are you doing?” Ian asked. “They’ll clear us tomorrow, then we can see plenty. We’re passive, remember? We walk around, do what we’re told, then we get out.”

“Then what’s up with the weapons? This isn’t just recon and you know it.” Kendall unzipped the tent.

“It’s backup, you told me yourself. Hey, wait.”

“I can’t,” Kendall said with almost a pleading tone. “I’m under orders.” And with that, he zipped the tent shut behind him and crunched away over the gravel, moving to the left.

Ian sat up, stunned. Kendall was a rule follower—okay, a rule questioner, but the point is he didn’t set off on his own, not without good reason. And as far as Ian knew, his search and interrogation had gone exactly as had Ian’s.

Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

They didn’t come into Ian’s heads as words, not exactly. More like very strong impressions that his mind then converted to words, like translation from a foreign language.

“That’s crazy,” he whispered. “I’m not going out there.”

Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

It came more insistently now, but still he resisted. A command? That wasn’t on the menu.

Markov, that bastard.

There was nothing, Markov had assured him, that would allow an outside agent to give him commands, and certainly not to give him this feeling of urgency, like a bladder overfilled to bursting, that made him want to get out of bed and follow Kendall into the night.

Get dressed, leave tent, take a right and walk one hundred meters.

Ian could no longer resist the order. Like Kendall, a few minutes earlier, he got up, dressed and went to the tent flap, which he unzipped before stepping outside.

He felt a moment of vertigo when he turned to rezip the tent. It felt as though his head were expanding and then he felt as though he was walking out of his body, floating above it, watching himself move. The implant must be firing like a machine gun down there, lighting up his nerve cells. His brain couldn’t keep up. At last, he made himself move forward.

He felt dizzy, his identity fading, his brain struggling to make sense of the two people in his head. Which one was he?

Slowly, he regained his balance. As he did, his thoughts came more clearly.

Markov had supervised Ian’s training, and Markov, of course, was need to know. He’d known that Ian’s one fear was having someone take control of his body like some horrific parasite feeding on his brain. Naturally, Markov had lied. Need to know, buddy, need to know. Surely you understand. We didn’t want you to freak out.

But what about Julia? She was the consummate professional, too sincere in her scientific interest to stand in front of Ian and tell him an absolute, bald-faced lie. She must not know.

Second big question, where did the command come from? Was it embedded code, set to go off with some trigger? That made no sense. How would they have known where Ian and Kendall would have their tent, or anything else that would allow for such specific instructions?

Either the CIA had someone else in camp, feeding instructions to his implant, or there was a plane—maybe a C-130—circling several miles from the camp, within line of sight, transmitting orders.

Go right one hundred meters.

“I’m going,” he muttered, although he knew they couldn’t hear him. “Give me a second you bastards.”

The tents stood a short distance behind the main bulk of construction activity. A pair of dump trucks rumbled by, loaded with road base. A moment later, an empty dump truck headed in the other direction.

What was this place? A new diamond mine? A Chinese military base? No, that was silly. And neither of those possibilities explained why you’d need an entire company of Blackwing contractors. The whole country of Namibia only had two million people in an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma put together. And Kaokoland was the empty quarter.

He turned right, the opposite direction that Kendall had taken, then followed the gravel path, beyond a diesel generator and restrooms. Two guys in orange overalls shaved at the outdoor sink and chatted in Chinese. Ian stopped and held perfectly still just long enough for the implant to record a snippet of their conversation, then continued. He passed more workers a moment later, but the men paid him no attention.

They’d thrown up a berm on the right side, fresh enough that it was still bare dirt, even though low scrub grew on the other side. The berm ended perpendicular with a concrete wall that blocked the gravel path, about the height of his shoulder.

Duck behind the wall.

He ducked, leaned against the wall. It was so new that he could still smell the curing cement. His body seemed to contract and he was fully inside his head again. The implant was quiet now, passive. A low conversation came to his ears from the other side.

Got to be a Spooky. AC-130U. Infrared would pick up the hot white lights of bodies on the other side of the cement barrier, had no doubt followed them from elsewhere in the camp and instructed Ian to follow, eavesdrop.

“…same rate,” said a voice in English, British accent. “Three more that size, already capped, pending infrastructure. Mid-range estimate is 32 GB of BOE.”

“Yeah, but what’s the estimated URR?” The second voice had a German accent, or maybe Scandinavian. Ian wasn’t sure.

“That
is
the URR. Current technology, nothing too funky. And it’s 38 degrees API.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Hell if I know. Li Hao is playing it like a trophy fish at this point. He doesn’t dare reel it in too fast or it will break the line.”

“You mean the Namibian government.”

“No, I’m talking about the Americans.”

“Ah, I got it. Well pretty soon it will be too late, even for the Americans.”

They moved away from the concrete wall and Ian was left confused. Words, lots of words, and in English. But he had no idea what they’d been talking about.

Climb over the wall. Follow at a distance.

Ian rose, glanced over the wall and could see the shadows of the two men, walking away slowly, still talking. He hoisted himself to the top and then something that felt like a giant hand grabbed him.

Go, now. Run.

Ian only paused for a moment at the abrupt change of instructions. Why? He hadn’t been detected; had Kendall been discovered?

Again, he suffered the feeling of being torn in two and lost his balance on top of the wall, fell over the other side. He landed on his back with a grunt. The two men heard him and turned around.

“Hey, what’s this? You okay, mate?”

But Ian was back on his feet. He turned and walked away in a hurry.

Back over the wall. Go. Now left. Over the berm.

In the distance, he heard a shout, then the sound of a helicopter lifting into the air. A floodlight swept across the berm and the instructions changed abruptly and sent him back the way he’d come. Trucks passed through the camp with swinging search lights. What the hell? Had they discovered him already?

He wanted to cut straight into the desert, toward the weapons cache. That’s what Kendall would think, assuming he’d been given the same order to run.

But he trusted the instructions now. The eye in the sky tracked enemy movements and fed him the information.

Ten o’clock. Turn and run. There’s a ditch.

He ducked into the ditch and scrambled through a culvert that passed under a road. A small animal scurried out, disturbed by the intruder. He scrambled up the other side, but then the instructions came to return the way he’d come. A truck crunched down the road toward him, brights shining.

He doubled back. The instructions grew more and more inconsistent and Ian knew he was in trouble. The eye in the sky couldn’t find a safe passage. There were too many enemies.

He crouched down, listening to the sound of his breath. He could feel the sweat on his forehead, beading up over the scars above his hairline. He tapped his fingers: middle, ring, ring, thumb, middle, index. Had to get control of his breathing, stop the fear that closed around his throat.

Kak! Where was Kendall?

His breathing slowed. He concentrated on what he could hear. Footsteps. Two pair. Dogs, barking. He flattened his body against the side of the culvert. A beam of light shot through the open end and glanced off the far wall.

“Come out! Slowly!”

Ian looked out the culvert at the barrel of an AK-47. He crawled out slowly. He was dead.

He emerged into the dusk to see three German shepherds drooling and snarling next to the man at the other end of the AK-47. A second man had another AK-47 targeted unflinching at his head. They held him at gunpoint until more men arrived, who dragged Ian onto the road. The voice in his head was silent.

Paul-Henri Dupont arrived by truck within minutes. “I should have trusted my gut. Your background check was good, your answers perfect, but something was wrong. I knew it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I got lost on my way to the bathrooms and then guys with guns started to chase me. Yeah, I started to run. You would’ve too.”

“So it’s just chance? Two hours after you came into camp, we pick up incoming signals, but that came from someone else, right?” Dupont gave a nod and two men jerked Ian to his feet. “You’ve got some sort of recording device on you. I don’t know where you hid it, but I’m going to find it, even if I have to dissect you centimeter by centimeter.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Julia came into the animal lab to find one of the macaques screaming in its cage. She avoided the lab, except when necessary, as she found the caged animals depressing and the noise distracting.

And then there was the smell. On good days it smelled like ammonia and formaldehyde. On bad days, feces and urine. Julia could deal with that; medical school had cured her of her natural squeamishness. But in the last week, another DARPA team had moved a row of stackable cages into the back corner, with rats that continually gnawed at food pellets or scratched at the lids to try to escape. Must have been thirty of them. And all those rats gave off a smell that was worse than any number of cadavers, pickled pig fetuses, or monkey poop. It made her stomach churn.

There were six primates in cages along the right wall—three baboons and three macaques. Before moving on to Ian and Kendall, Julia had practiced the implant surgery on their brains. There had been a few hitches, most notably one baboon that still suffered seizures and a macaque with a thrombosed vein that had induced a small stroke, but each surgery had been labeled a success. The patients had lived, the implants performed to spec. Now over a year following the first implant, the endoscopic technique was becoming easier for her.

The animals were rattling their cages and one macaque in particular kept throwing himself into the door. He bared his teeth and screeched.

A man in a white lab coat stood in front of the cage. He didn’t appear to be doing anything unusual, just fiddling with a laptop and pointing a wireless probe at the monkey’s skull. But it drove the monkey crazy.

“Hey, you,” she said. “What are you doing to him?”

The man turned with a start. It was the software engineer who had shown up after Ian Westhelle’s surgery to “upgrade” the firmware. Hubert Chang.

She had seen him coming and going from Markov’s office over the last two weeks, even saw him enter a secure conference in the atrium with the deputy director of intelligence for the CIA and Sarah Redd, the Director of National Intelligence.