The Judas Contact (Boomers Book 1) (12 page)

She sighed, preparing a mental apology as she looked across the kitchen at Garrett. He ate the omelet with gusto.

“Thank you.” He said after swallowing with what looked like pleasure. Her mouth opened and then closed again. “Is your wrist all right?”

“It’s fine.” She stared as he dug into the omelet, finishing it in four more bites. “You don’t have to eat that to humor me.”

“I’m not. It’s good. You should eat yours.” He finished his coffee in two swallows.

“I’m actually not that hungry,” she murmured.

He walked across the kitchen and claimed her plate. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He started cutting up the omelet and ate it with gusto. “You should eat more.”

“I’ll get some waffles. I promise.”
And I swear I will never try to cook again…
That oath seemed a little weak in light of his enjoyment. “I’m really sorry about earlier, Garrett. I won’t do it again, I promise.”

“We’ll forget it for now. What’s next on your tests?” He was all business. She swallowed. It had been a lot easier before that dream.

Even easier before she woke up and saw him in the doorway—all of him. He really was a spectacular looking man.

Clearing her throat, she added some more coffee to his cup. “I want to see if we can access your chip while you’re in the FMRI. Is it activated visually?”

He shrugged. He’d shaved since their nap, washed up. His damp hair told her he’d showered, too. She had to wonder if his towels went into the furnace along with all the other pieces that came into contact with his skin. Her body tingled at the idea of the towel rubbing him dry and she twisted to look away from him. What about showers? Did he have his own water tank? The image of water sluicing over his naked form was not a helpful train of thought.

“It’s visual sometimes. Sometimes it’s information that we receive. A name. A date. A location.”

So, starting with visual cues would be a good plan. “Is that how it’s always worked?”

“No. When we first arrived, they detailed our orders.” That was more useful information.

“When did that stop?” She picked up his plate from the counter and carried it over to wash, taking her time with the pots and pans as well. He never told her to wear gloves when she did the dishes. Was he able to concentrate enough to keep from contaminating the fork?

He frowned.

“Mine went quiet in the eighties after I worked with a virologist. I think Simon’s began quieting in the late seventies. Not sure about the others.”

She turned. “They didn’t stop at the same time?” That was a definite oddity. “Can you text them to find out what events precipitated the lack in functionality?”

“Yeah, I’ll take care of it. The lab?” He opened the door to the basement and she shut off the water, headed down, drying her hands with a towel.

“You said after you worked with a virologist. Walk me through what you did with him?” The mechanical hum from downstairs soothed her frayed nerves. She was on the hunt for the chip again, and that also helped to distract from her raging hormones.

“Standard medical research. He worked primarily with viruses, bacteria, pathology and almost exclusively inside the clean room.” Garrett paused in the center of the lab while she continued over to the FMRI. The equipment took up a third of the floor space they had available and they’d isolated it into a side room where the magnets wouldn’t mess with the rest of the equipment. “Nothing outstanding.”

“Were you exposed to any of the pathogens?” The chip’s resumption of activities suggested it hadn’t shorted out. But maybe it had. She booted up the computer and checked the settings.

“Would that really matter to me?” Garrett shrugged, the dry tone reminding her of the irony in that question. “They don’t hurt me.”

“Maybe not.” She looked at him. “But just because your body produces toxins doesn’t make it automatically immune to pathogens. Viruses affect different people different ways—they’re DNA based—”

DNA based.

She walked away from the FMRI and over to the laptop she’d been working on. Flipping it open, she powered it back up. The screen flashed back to the original scan she’d taken. The network of circuits on the chip twined one over the other like strands of DNA.

“They grew their circuits. Oh my God. This may be based on my chip design but it’s not my chip—at least not yet. I’ve only managed this in theory. It’s a theory—” She repeated that like it meant something.

“What is it?” Garrett stood right behind her, looking at the screen as though trying to see what she saw.

“It’s DNA based. They grew these circuits. They’re organic.”
Organic chips.
The possibilities of organic enhancement were endless. They could be programmed to interact with individual minds, reduce the chances for rejection, and increase longevity. They would literally become a part of the brain. Organic chips opened so many doors, so many windows to treatment for patients from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s.

She had to get her hands on that design.

“So you think you can figure out how it works, Ilsa?”

She looked up at him, fierce in her determination. “I’m damn sure going to try.”

An organic chip could also help control involuntary reactions—like hormone and neurotransmitter release and the production of poison. “I am absolutely going to try.”

“I know we’ve been at this for hours, but temporal mapping takes time. What the eye sees is registered on the photoreceptors within a millisecond. Visual signals are registered in the primary visual cortex within ten milliseconds. The FMRI records this and provides me with spikes to study. We have one hundred milliseconds to record that neuronal activity.” She talked to him regularly, recording brain activity and imaging. The images she used included his team, her, and Rory. The chip remained relatively quiet during each of the images.

“Garrett, we need something more—something likely to trigger the chip. Any suggestions?” She marked the small spikes. They weren’t sparking the visual cortex, they only radiated out from the thalamus. The activity went somewhere else.

“Try locations. It used to have a history identifier function. The world looked very different between 1965 and 2105. We needed the information to navigate.” The ease with which he said 2105, as though it had already happened, left her unsettled. It was one thing to accept the theory of time travel. It was something else altogether to accept it as reality. For the last four hours, Garrett had endured the battery of images and the constant play and replay while she adjusted for his responses and neurological mapping.

“How did you navigate? Currency must have been different. The changes between today and 1965 are pretty dramatic. We use electronic currency far more regularly than cash denominations.” The resonance imager continued to supply data. She was interested in watching the internal reactions to his spinal column as well as his brain. The brain sent millions of messages a day from maintenance calls to requirements for hormone release, to autonomic systems such as messages telling the lungs to breathe and the heart to beat—so much that it controlled. So much to map.

“Simon’s good with money. We knew what stocks to invest in, what companies would climb, when to buy and when to short.” Which explained the several million-dollar home in the Hamptons and more equipment than some medical facilities saw in a lifetime.

She queued up images of major landmarks. Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and Seattle earned nothing more than a mild blip. Testing a theory, she searched for images of the Hamptons’ house. Nothing. She interspersed images of presidents and other popular figures. Leaving those on a loop, she brought up a second window and began looking for press images of the Infinity team. Despite their reputation, they were notoriously press shy. It still blew her mind that Rory was actually one of them. She should have seen the resemblance to her friend in the photographs, but the times when they were snapped in action, the threats were usually far more provocative than the heroes fighting them.

Codenamed Halo, Rory’s white body suit included a rainbow swath that traveled from her shoulder to her hip and then down one leg. The shimmering fabric reflected light back, creating glare in nearly every image—another protective feature Ilsa was sure. She finally found a good one and she slipped that into the rotation.

A spike jerked on the FMRI.

“It’s active.” Garrett warned her, but she already saw that in the spikes. Brain activity increased and she hit
print
on two of the scans, marking the neural activity. The chip did react, almost within a millisecond of receiving the data from the thalamus, before it transferred on to the visual cortex. The chip acted as a funnel for processing.

“What kind of activity?”

“Identification. Powers. Weaknesses.”

“No commands?”

“No.”

She nodded and added different images to the rotation. Major landmarks in New York. They were an obvious choice to begin with, but she wanted a baseline.

Image of the Flatiron Building.

“Active.”

Image of the World Trade Center.

“Active.”

Image of Grand Central Station.

Nothing.

Image of the Statue of Liberty.

Nothing.

Image of Times Square.

Nothing.

Image of Wall Street, including protestors staging a sit in.

“Holy shit.”

The brain map lit up. Heat spread from the thalamus to the chip to the visual cortex and beyond. The machine could barely keep up with the readouts, spikes shooting up all over the place.

“Garrett?”

An alarm sounded. The readouts on the screen went blank. Standing, she pressed her palm flat against the glass separating her station from the machine. “Garrett?”

He pulled himself out then hit his feet in one smooth motion. But it wasn’t his physical activity that worried her. It was the blank look on his face.

“Garrett?” The door hissed open and he strode out, seemingly oblivious to her. She grabbed at his arm as he went to move past her. He shook her off and she had to scramble to get in front of him and block him bodily on the stairs.

“Stop.” Her hand flattened against his chest. His eyes stared at her, unseeing. He put a gloved hand on each of her arms and lifted her.

Whatever the hell was happening, he wasn’t seeing or hearing her. He lifted her like she was paper, turned and deposited her on the step below him. His boots thudded against the wooden stairs with each step he took. The door opened at the top and he vanished through it. Ilsa raced up the stairs after him, wincing as she stubbed her bare foot. She’d slid her shoes off while working at the computer.

He wasn’t in the kitchen.

She darted through to the foyer. An alarm sounded and she whirled around. She hadn’t left the house since they arrived a few days previously. Fumbling for her pocket, she dragged out Rory’s gifted cell phone and ran toward the garage door. It stood open and Garrett loaded two large weapons into the back of the van.

“Wait!” She shouted the order, but he didn’t slow down. She debated the wisdom of jumping into a-soon-to-be-moving vehicle, with a glazed out driver, and grabbed the passenger door handle. The garage door rolled up slowly and the engine revved. She barely managed to slide into the seat before he accelerated backwards. She caught herself with one hand on the dashboard.

Dialing the cell phone, she put it to her ear. Rory answered on the first ring. “What’s wrong?”

“Something’s wrong with Garrett. We were testing the chip and he just got up and left. He’s non-responsive to auditory stimuli. I think we triggered some kind of passive protocol.”

“Where are you now?”

The sunlight cut across her vision, almost blinding. She really had been inside for days. Blinking back the tears, she watched the house retreat as Garrett turned the van around and accelerated down the driveway. If he had a problem with her in the car, he didn’t say a word.

“We’re in the van. We just left the house in the Hamptons and we’re heading for a main road.”

“He’s driving?” Over the phone, she could hear the sound of rubber skidding on concrete and the pound of steps. The soft huffs of breath told her Rory was running.

“Yes, he’s driving. We’re going about sixty miles per hour right now and he’s still not looking at me or talking.” It occurred to her that she didn’t have a seat belt on and twisted to grab the strap and pulled it over herself, fumbling to get it to latch.

“Ilsa, you’re on speaker with Simon, Michael, and Drake. Tell us exactly what happened and where you’re going.”

“I used the FMRI. We were trying to stimulate the chip with images to get a clean read on what areas of the brain it accessed. We weren’t getting a lot of blips until I added some images of the Infinity team and New York landmarks.”

“Which landmarks?” The calm, soothing voice had to be Simon’s. She’d only met him the once, but his voice was butter smooth.

“The Flatiron building…um…the World Trade Center…and…oh, and Wall Street.” The speedometer on the dash continued to climb past the sixty mile an hour mark towards seventy and past that. The van shook around her, as if rattling in protest to the lead foot. “We’re on the expressway right now, heading straight toward the city.”

“Michael and Rory are on their way to you right now. Can Garrett hear me at all?” Simon’s soft tone was totally at odds with the situation.

“No. I don’t think he even hears me at the moment.” They weaved in and out of traffic, circumventing slower moving cars.

“Okay, while he’s driving, I don’t dare try to take control. If he fights, he could flip the van or cause an accident. So we need to bring him out of whatever this is.”

She had already figured that part out, but she didn’t know what to do. She reached over and slapped his arm.

Nothing.

She grabbed at the fabric to pinch him.

Nothing.

“Ilsa, can you still hear me?”

“Yes, I’m trying to get his attention. But nothing’s working.”

“Is there a gun there?”

“I’m
not
shooting him.”
What kind of friends were these guys?