The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Read online

  Jarvis picked up the plastic bag and was surprised when he saw the needle–shaped metal object bend and break in even a gentle grasp.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Nellis said as he saw Jarvis’s concern at the break. ‘The object is heavily decayed. Doctor Shrivener managed to X–Ray it and obtained a three dimensional scan.’

  ‘This isn’t the work of some lunatic on the street; this is high technology, something that only a country like ours could create.’

  ‘Which is why you’re here,’ Nellis said. ‘I want Warner and Lopez in on this.’

  Jarvis looked up at Nellis again as he set the bag back down on the desk. ‘Majestic Twelve?’

  ‘It’s possible they’re involved,’ Nellis said. ‘As you said, this kind of technology doesn’t just turn up out of nowhere. Wherever it came from and whoever inserted it into the general’s brain, we’ve got about seventy two hours to figure it out and bring it to an end because as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, if a four–star general can end up killing innocent recruits in the middle of one of the largest infantry bases in the continental United States…’

  ‘There could be more of them,’ Jarvis acknowledged. ‘And they could be anywhere.’

  ‘We’ve already enacted a protocol, quietly,’ Nellis said, ‘and X–Ray scans of all military personnel are underway, but even so it will take weeks to clear our entire staff, and as for civilians there’s no way we can scan three hundred fifty million Americans without causing a major panic. This has to be done under the radar Doug, and it has to be done fast. Your people excel at this kind of thing.’

  Jarvis nodded. ‘I’ll get right on it. Will we have support?’

  ‘From the top, just like I said,’ Nellis confirmed. ‘The FBI’s Director may well attempt to oppose you, but with presidential backing he’s going to have to figure out another way to carry out MJ–12’s bidding, and if he does, this time we’ll be there to catch him.’

  ***

  III

  Al Utaykah, Basra,

  Iraq

  Fear.

  Kiera Lomas sucked in a mouthful of dusty air and coughed, her head bowed down so tight that her chin jabbed her chest as she choked. Her wrists were bound with coarse hemp rope that sheared the skin from her wrists, her hair hanging in limp fronds and her ankles shackled to a chain in the concrete floor of the cell.

  She had been taken four days before, or that was as close as she could guess her abduction had taken place. The market district, strolling among the stalls, the smell of fresh goods on the air, warm sunlight, smiles of greeting, a rare break from the monotony of the next breaking report from the remains of a country that the rest of the world was trying to forget.

  Then the looks of concern on the market traders’ faces, the sudden scurrying away of other shoppers, shouts of alarm, and then they were upon her. A dusty looking truck or 4x4, she couldn’t really be certain, had careered into the market and smashed its way past several stalls, braking to a halt within ten yards of where she stood. She had known then of course that she should run immediately, but her legs had betrayed her and the doors of the vehicle had burst open to reveal masked men armed with Kalashnikovs who swarmed upon her like demons upon a fallen angel, dragging her into the labyrinths of Hell.

  Keira knew that she was underground, concealed in a pit beneath the floorboards of some old building likely bombed–out years before by her own countrymen. Basra had been the site of some of the war’s most vicious battles between the forces of Al–Qaeda and both American and British infantry, alongside their fledgling Iraqi comrades. The masked abductors had bundled her into the vehicle despite her protestations that she was a reporter and not a spy or soldier, and within half an hour they had shoved her into a building that she presumed acted as some kind of safe house.

  She had not immediately been placed into her underground prison, although now she wished that she had been. Instead, she had been dragged into a small room wherein a thin, stained mattress adorned an iron–framed bed. There, she had been bound to the headboard and her clothes sliced from her body using long–bladed knives that were frequently waved in front of her face to dissuade her from any opposition. Lying naked before the masked men, she had been forced to watch as they bartered cigarettes for the rights to her body, sniggering and jostling and arguing until a hierarchy had been accepted. One of her captors had placed a blindfold over her eyes before the men removed their masks.

  She did not care to recall what had happened next, the memory buried somewhere deep inside a neural tract that she hoped she would never, ever revisit. Cut free from her bonds afterward, she was hastily dressed in a burka and then dragged into incarceration in the pit in which she now huddled in her own filth, her mouth dry from dehydration and her mind filled with terrifying hallucinations of what terrible fate awaited her at the hands of the captors whose identity she now knew.

  Islamic State. They had been known to burn people alive at the stake, a fate so unbelievably barbaric it had not been witnessed since it had been routinely practiced by Christians in medieval Europe hundreds of years before. Islamic State, along with the Taliban and Al–Qaeda had beheaded Western journalists live in front of television cameras and broadcast the grisly videos to the world, shot schoolgirls, seemingly competing with each other in order to increase the barbarism they enjoyed inflicting on the innocent around them.

  And now Kiera was in their hands.

  A noise from somewhere outside sent shockwaves of fear pulsing like writhing snakes through her shivering body and she tried to stifle her sobs as she heard heavy footsteps stomping toward her amid angry bursts of Arabic and Urdu. A heavy latch was slid through its mounts and the trapdoor above her hauled open.

  Rough, dirty hands hauled her up and out of the pit, the pitiful shawl around her falling away to reveal her nakedness once more, smeared now with bodily fluids. Gasps of disgust were followed with more angry shouts as Kiera felt something draped across her shoulders, felt a more gentle touch guide her away from her captors through the building.

  Crippled by fear, Kiera allowed herself to be led, her bare feet slapping on cool stone. She could feel the man alongside her, could smell the scent of tobacco on his breath, could hear the sound of his breathing as he led her into another room and closed the door behind them.

  ‘This way.’

  She startled, the voice almost American, Middle East accented but recognizably touched with a New York twang. For a moment she wondered whether she was about to be rescued, but she quickly realized that such good fortune was not possible. This man was as much an abductor as the men who had raped her, was her enemy as they were.

  Her thighs bumped against the edge of a bed and the man’s hands guided her to sit down. Keira perched on the edge of the bed and suddenly she felt her ankles swung up onto the mattress and a strap pulled tightly over her legs to secure them in place. Her heart sank as she realized that she was once again to be raped and she was unable to stifle a sob.

  ‘Quiet now,’ the man said. ‘You will not be harmed.’

  She felt his hands unwrap the blindfold and suddenly light filled her vision. She squinted, trying to focus on the room around her. Slowly she noticed a series of lights set into the ceiling, the walls around her painted a clinically bright white that reflected the glare. She turned her head and saw that a man was standing over her. Dark skin, dark eyes, heavy beard, a white lab coat that contrasted with his tanned skin and the cruel gleam in his eyes.

  Keira glanced to one side and a wretched fear twisted her guts as she saw a trolley bearing medical equipment; scalpels, needles and tweezers all gleaming in the light.

  ‘Do not fear them,’ the man said. ‘Soon, you will fear nothing.’

  Keira’s limbs began to twitch erratically and her breath came in short, sharp gasps as she replied.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing?’

  The man smiled without warmth or compassion as he turned away from Kiera and walked across to the trolley. He pick
ed up a hypodermic needle that was filled with a clear fluid and flicked the needle to ensure no air was trapped before he moved beyond a muslin veil that shielded her view from the rest of the room.

  She could hear movement outside the veil and she fell silent and still. Another noise, like two pieces of metal being tapped together, then that voice whispering in the darkness.

  ‘Has he survived?’

  Her breathing rasped and she could feel her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest.

  ‘We have signals verified from the pre–frontal cortex.’

  A figure moved past nearby and the muslin sheet rippled and parted enough for her to see into the room beyond. Some ten feet away was a metal gurney upon which lay the naked form of a man. Tubes protruded from his body and she could see his chest rising and falling. An intravenous line rose up to a saline bag suspended above his head and she could see that his nose was swathed in blood–stained bandages.

  Kiera started to twist her hands back and forth, seeking a weakness in her bonds. Her wrists were narrow and her hands small, perhaps small enough to squeeze free. She forced the thumb of her left hand inward and then pulled against the strap. The strap scraped against her skin but she felt the edge move. She pulled harder and the strap slipped further over her hand. She gritted her teeth against the pain and pulled hard.

  The strap slipped across her hand and then it jerked free. She clenched her hand a few times before reaching across and loosening the strap on her right wrist.

  ‘He’s coming round.’

  She sat up in the bed as she heard a faint whimper from across the room as though someone were crying out for help. She turned and saw the naked man’s body quiver.

  ‘He’s almost awake,’ the voice said again.

  The body shuddered again as though live current were zipping through dormant muscles. Another murmur came from deep within the man that rose suddenly to an ear piercing scream of anguish that soared through the building. The body flailed, the naked man sobbing and screaming as he thrashed about on the table as the doctors sought to restrain him.

  The man began frothing at the mouth, choking on his own saliva and his head began crashing violently against the gurney. Kiera’s guts convulsed as she saw him suddenly snap his mouth open and shut with sharp cracks and a thick torrent of blood spill down his chin as he crunched through his own tongue.

  The man’s body convulsed violently once again and then suddenly it stiffened and then sagged, the limbs falling to its sides as the sound of a fixed–tone pulse monitor droned in the sudden silence. Kiera stared in horror at the corpse, its ruined tongue dangling by threads from his mouth and strings of blood drooling away toward the floor.

  She heard a sigh, and then another voice.

  ‘At least we still have the woman.’

  Kiera yanked the restraints free and leaned forward in a desperate attempt to free her legs as a whimper of terror blurted from between her lips. The muslin sheet was whipped aside before she could free herself, and she cried out as two men wrestled her back down onto the bed and fastened her wrists back into place.

  ‘Let me go!’ she screamed. ‘What are you doing?!’

  The doctor smiled down at her without compassion.

  ‘It would not matter if I told you who I was, why you were here or even what is going to happen to you, for you would not recall it anyway.’

  Kiera whimpered as the syringe in the doctor’s hand drew closer to her. ‘Please, let me go.’

  Again that cruel smile, fixed it seemed upon his face as he leaned in.

  ‘That, my dear, is precisely what I intend to do.’

  Kiera squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the needle slip with a sharp pain into her arm, and then a cold sensation flowed through her veins that chilled her to her core. Slowly, her rapidly beating heart and labored breathing faded away into blackness, and her last thought was her horror at feeling the man gently caressing her brow with one hand as she passed out.

  ***

  IV

  DIAC Building,

  Washington DC

  ‘This feels weird.’

  Nicola Lopez stood at the security check point inside the entrance to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a pass was clipped to her shirt by a security guard, showing an image of her exotically tanned skin, dark eyes and long black hair. Even such a small photograph seemed to project the supressed anger she carried around with her like a talisman.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Ethan Warner replied. ‘It’s better than all the sneaking around we’ve been doing these years past.’

  The DIA’s south wing entrance, in front of which was a fountain before broad lawns, made up only a tiny part of the agency’s sprawling complex. Huge, silvery buildings with mirrored black windows contained some of the most sensitive intelligence gathering equipment in the world, including vast 24/7 Watch Centers manned by specialists monitoring events across the entire globe.

  It had been a long time since Ethan Warner had set foot in the building, a long series of controversies separating Lopez and he from their official work for the DIA. Years in fact, ever since the events in Idaho. Only now, with presidential support for the DIA’s operations under the control of Doug Jarvis, had they finally been able to come back in from the cold.

  In all they had conducted seven investigations for the Defense Intelligence Agency since Ethan, a former Marine Corps Lieutenant and later vagrant, had been plucked from Cook County Jail by his former platoon commander, Doug Jarvis, and given a new life working for one of the most clandestine units ever created by the intelligence community. Despite the trials they had faced over the years, he had to admit to himself that it felt good to be officially working for the good guys once again, if that they could be called.

  Lopez led the way through the intense security measures, including full–body X–Rays and pat down searches. Ethan glimpsed their own images on monitors in the security stations: Lopez’s diminutive frame, radiating an attitude as usual that he was surprised didn’t show up on the X–Ray screens as a glowing red halo. His own rangy form followed, unkempt light brown hair, wide jaw and a loose–limbed stride.

  They finally passed through the last of the checks in time for Jarvis to meet them in the main foyer of the building, the polished tile floor emblazoned with a large DIA emblem in the manner of all the senior intelligence agencies. Ethan wondered whether it helped them to remember which agency they actually worked for.

  ‘You made it through without being shot at,’ Jarvis observed laconically. ‘That’s a first.’

  ‘Why are we here?’ Lopez demanded, her arms folded. She had never been a fan of either Jarvis or the DIA, but the call to the headquarters had been sufficiently unusual for her to make the trip. As the new boss of the renamed Lopez & Warner Inc, their bail–bondsman outfit, she had become somewhat inclined to getting her way.

  ‘Come with me,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Ethan followed them, aware of the large number of civilian staff walking through the building. Uniquely to a highly secretive intelligence agency, two thirds of the DIA’s seventeen thousand employees were civilian, which allowed select freelance operatives like Warner and Lopez to act in concert with official employees like Jarvis. Represented in some one hundred forty countries and with its own Clandestine Service, to which Ethan and Nicola were now attached, the agency’s only flaw was a lack of influence in law enforcement, forcing Ethan and Nicola in past cases to work alongside police and federal law agencies around the country.

  Jarvis led them to an office on the third floor, which to Ethan’s surprise was emblazoned with the old man’s name once again.

  ‘Don’t tell me they’ve let you back in the door for good?’ Lopez asked with a resigned tone.

  ‘Such warmth, such happiness,’ Jarvis replied as he led them into the office. ‘It’s a wonder you don’t burst with joy every morning, Nicola.’

  Ethan stepped into the office and Lopez kicked the door shut with a
back–flick of her heel.

  ‘You’ve taken the fun out of my life one too many times,’ she shot back. ‘Spill the beans or we’re out of here.’

  Jarvis sat down behind his desk and glanced at Ethan. ‘I might put you up for some kind of medal for coping with this every day.’

  ‘Just send me into a war zone for a break every now and again,’ Ethan suggested. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Assassinations,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I take it you’ve seen the news reports coming out of Georgia?’

  ‘The army general, ran riot and murdered a bunch of recruits,’ Lopez replied. ‘Tragic to say the least. What happened to him, PTSD?’

  Jarvis shook his head and slid a series of photographs across the desk to them.

  ‘No. This happened to him.’

  Ethan looked down at the images, all close up shots of a sliver of metal an inch or so long according to the dime placed alongside the exhibit, which was sealed in a plastic evidence bag.

  ‘Wow, he must have been good. The general killed all those people with this little thing?’ Lopez suggested.

  ‘In a sense, yes,’ Jarvis explained. ‘This was extracted from his frontal lobes during autopsy and sent here for analysis. Director Nellis briefed me on the case an hour ago, which was when I called you.’

  Ethan felt something cold ripple like insects crawling under his skin as he digested what Jarvis had said.

  ‘It was in his brain?’

  ‘The frontal lobes,’ Jarvis repeated. ‘It’s made from a metallic alloy and is designed to be ejected from the body after death, upon receiving no further signals from the brain. It would have been lost had the general not been autopsied so quickly after his death.’