Chasing Ghosts (27 page)

“
I don’t see any dials on the walls,”
Sara said. “No radios, CDs.” She stared at the ceiling. “Do you
think there are speakers up there?”

Dagger stepped forward, curious about the one
square of black marble near the center of the room and to the right
of the throne-type chair. Sara tugged on his arm.

“
Don’t.” She scrutinized the walls,
studied the ceiling again. “We’re being watched,” Sara whispered.
“I can feel it.”

Dagger could feel it, too, but couldn’t find
any monitors. He pulled Skizzy’s toy from his pocket. It was still
operating. Two things happened simultaneously. A podium rose from
the black marble and a large computer monitor appeared to hang from
the ceiling. Dagger took a step back as a faint light started at
the top of his head and flashed down his body.

“
Oh my God,” Sara gasped. “It gave you
a retina and full body scan.”

A message appeared on the monitor.

Welcome home 617

CHAPTER 32

Dagger took two more steps back but then a
woman appeared on the screen. She had dark hair and brown eyes. It
was the same woman they had seen with the baby but she appeared
older. Fine lines etched the corners of her eyes. Her hair had
hints of gray.

“
I knew you’d come back,
darling.”

“
Darling?” Sara whispered. “I told you
she was your wife.”

Mother

“
Your mother?” Sara said. “Maybe she’s
the Connie that was mentioned on Demko’s computer hard
drive.”

On the lower right side of the screen
the word
KONRAD
flashed.

“
The computer is answering your
questions,” Dagger said. “The computer is Connie.”

She created me

“
You must have been the baby we saw her
holding. What do they do here?”

The monitor displayed what looked like a
sleep clinic. Boys had wires attached to their scalps as they
slept.

Training and reprogramming

“
Programming for what?” Dagger
suspected the answer. The remote facility, the surgical room, the
high tech equipment. He was starting to get a picture.

Pursue and exterminate

“
Exterminate whom?” Sara almost shouted
the question.

“
S…” Dagger hesitated, not wanting to
mention her name. “Don’t use our names,” he whispered to Sara. He
wasn’t sure if anyone was monitoring their words and feeding it
back to another location. The image on the screen vanished,
replaced by what looked like a training camp. All of the boys had
shaven heads and were dressed in white karate outfits. It
progressed to boys a couple years older dressed in black uniforms
shooting at small robot tanks as target practice.

“
No wonder you knew the tank had an
energy pack,” Sara said.

Sara was too eager to ask questions when he
had too many questions of his own. First and foremost was the
tracking device in his neck.

“
How are the explosives ignited?”
Dagger asked.

Explosives?

“
You don’t know that others were
vaporized when their missions weren’t completed?”

A cursor blinked on the screen, as though
Connie were searching for facts, or waiting for instructions.

You compromised site. Corporation moved to
undisclosed location. If modifications

were made it was after you left, to prevent
future defections.

“
That doesn’t make sense,” Sara
blurted. “If you were given instructions, how could you deviate?
And it’s the computer that gave you the instructions. Why is it
cooperating now? After all, Demko was following Connie’s
instructions.”

All computers named Connie.

Mother reprogrammed directives.

Changed some sentries. Changed you.

“
What happened to her, the mother?”
Sara asked.

Eliminated

“
Where are the other locations?” Dagger
remembered additional lights on the map. One had been in a location
pretty close to where they stood now. Two were in Europe and more
in Asia. If he could only get exact locations.

Unable to retrieve

“
Of course you can’t,” Dagger said, the
frustration building. If this facility had been vacated, probably
all the rest had been moved, too. “If you aren’t supposed to be
online then you aren’t connected to the rest of the
computers.”

“
Why is it you don’t remember her? You
don’t remember anything.” Sara asked.

He erased your memory

“
But you remembered the numbers,” Sara
told Dagger. “The coordinates that led you here.”

“
No, I only recognized the numbers as
coordinates. Big difference.”

“
But you remember destroying their
satellite.”

“
I did that right before I escaped…I
think.”

Dagger rubbed his eyes. The light from the
monitor was blinding. None of this made sense and if he had heard
it all yesterday, he wouldn’t have believed it.

“
Wait.” Sara grabbed Dagger’s arm,
remembering the family in the director’s home. “Who is he? Who’s
the director?”

The computer was silent for several seconds
as the cursor blinked in the middle of the screen. Was it searching
through videotape? Searching its stored information? After several
more seconds one word appeared on the screen.

Father

Dagger stumbled back remembering that brief
image of shoving a gun against a man’s head. “Is he dead?”

Several more seconds passed before a response
appeared.

Unknown

Dagger was beginning to doubt Connie’s
memory. How could it not have a record of everything that happened
down here? It wouldn’t be hard for someone to erase a hard drive
and replace it with fabricated information.

“
So I’m supposed to believe a computer
just sat down here dormant until I walked in. That no one destroyed
you when the place was evacuated.” Dagger felt even more like an
idiot addressing the computer as though it were human.

They gave me the command to destroy all
backups. Mother assumed their next

step and gave me a counter-directive.

“
She took a big chance,” Dagger said.
“It was possible I would have never come back.”

Eventually someone would have found your
computer chip.

Mother made sure coordinates were on the
cover.

I am patient

“
Why all the special effects?” Sara
asked. “The park, the people, dogs, sun, rain. What was all that
about?”

I was lonely

For a while neither one said anything. This
computer was so advanced it had the emotions of a human. It had the
desire to surround itself with familiar faces, sights, and sounds.
Suddenly the screen filled with the same phrase, repeating I was
lonely hundreds of times.

“
What’s happening?” Sara yelled. She
looked at Dagger but his eyes were entranced, jerking left to right
as though reading every line.

Sara studied the words filling the screen.
She called on her enhanced eyesight and could see they weren’t just
words but also snapshots of people. But everything was moving too
fast for her to read. Then the alarm sounded followed by the
tramping of heavy feet coming from above.

“
STOP! TURN OFF!” Sara wasn’t sure what
command could get the computer to stop but whatever it was doing it
was doing it to Dagger. Had the computer kept them there until
guards could arrive? Had it notified someone that they were there?
And was the computer giving Dagger new instructions? She had to do
something to stop it since she couldn’t get any response from
Dagger. She wanted to yell out his name but Dagger had cautioned
not to use their names. Sara looked for a switch on the wall,
something to turn off the computer. A box the size of an air
purifier hung in the corner of the room. She doubted it would house
the hard drive. It was too small for a computer that controlled as
much as it did. But the entire facility was so advanced that
nothing would surprise her.

Sara pounded at the buttons, checked the
screen. “MOVE AWAY,” she yelled at Dagger. Now the clanging of
heavy boots against the grated staircase grew louder. Sara kicked
at the unit and three doors popped open. Small key fobs were
inserted in the CPU. She yanked out the fobs and kicked the CPU off
the wall. It clattered to the ground and the computer monitor
disappeared.

A loud voice sounded over the speakers.

“
THIS FACILITY WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN
FIVE MINUTES.”

Dagger shook his head, feeling a stabbing
pain behind his eyes. “What the hell is happening?”

“
We have to get out of here. Someone’s
coming.”

Dagger joined her at the doorway. In the next
sector, past the surgical rooms, four men marched in swat team
garb, helmets concealing their faces, body armor covering every
inch of exposed skin, boots heavy enough to rattle the thick glass
walls. The lead guard raised a dull black metal object. A bright
stream of light shot out, disintegrating the door frame.

“
Holograms?” Dagger asked.

“
No.”

“
Aim for the weapons,” Sara said.
“There isn’t any part of their bodies that’s exposed.”

“
Their necks. I see a small segment
where the body armor meets. It’s not all one piece.”

Sara aimed the gun at the second guard as
Dagger took care of the first, firing at the guard’s hand, sending
the weapon sprawling across the hall and the hand shattering into
several pieces.

“
More fuckin’ robots,” Dagger said.
“Which means they don’t die.”

“
Which means,” Sara clarified, “that
they have to have a power pack somewhere.”

“
THIS FACILITY WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN
FOUR MINUTES.”

“
Where to?” Dagger
whispered.

“
Back to the hallway. I think the
office with the elevator is by the exit door at the end of the
hall.”

“
Four minutes,” Dagger reminded her. He
let Sara lead the way while he covered her.

They charged out of the room and down the
hall. A blast of hot air skidded across the wall to Dagger’s right.
He fired several shots.

“
Shit, they have bulletproof
everything. And what the hell kind of guns are those?”

They rounded a corner and ran right into
another guard. Dagger charged the guard but was knocked away like a
pesky fly. He hit the wall feeling all the air rush from his lungs.
The guard raised his gun but Sara kicked it away, ducked a blow
from an arm the size of a tree trunk, drove a hard kick at his
chest and sent him flying fifteen feet. She grabbed the guard’s
weapon, found the trigger and fired. A stream of white light lit up
the man’s suit.

“
What is this?” Sara stared at the
gun.

“
This way,” Dagger said pressing a hand
to his ribs.

Sara glanced across the aisle and recognized
the office. “No, this way.” She rushed across the hall, firing the
weapon at the pursuing guards. Dagger fired several shots as Sara
crossed the threshold. Dagger stumbled in after her, feeling a
blast of heat at his side. For some reason his fingers lost their
grip and his gun dropped to the floor.

Sara said, “I think that’s all of them.”

The office door slid shut like an air lock.
Then Dagger’s legs gave way and he slowly slid to the floor leaving
a trail of red along the wall.

“
Dagger?” Sara wrapped an arm around
his waist and felt her hand slide into his side which was warm and
sticky. She pulled back her hand. It was covered in blood. “Oh my
God.”

He struggled to focus, tried to reason why he
didn’t feel any pain.

“
THIS FACILITY WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN
THREE MINUTES.”

“
Don’t you die on me.”

“
Go.” His breath came in ragged gasps.
“This is where I belong.”

“
I am not leaving without you.” She
wrapped her arms around him in an attempt to lift him from the
floor. “You can’t die. Think of all the things you have left to do.
You are the only one who can expose BettaTec.”

What exactly did he have left to do? Destroy
BettaTec? Seems impossible now. He is only one man and he hadn’t
been able to even slow them down. No, he could only think of one
thing he would want to do before he died. Dagger stared at Sara’s
face, wanting to remember those fabulous eyes, those lips. Yes,
there was one thing he wanted to do before he died. Where he found
the energy he didn’t know but he reached up, placed a hand around
the back of Sara’s head and pulled her toward him. He kissed her
and for several seconds forgot that there was a ticking time bomb,
that his blood was seeping from his body and spilling onto the
floor. He didn’t care. All he wanted was to taste her, remember the
smell of her hair, the feel of her skin. She clung to him as though
she were the one dying. The one memory he would take with him would
be a kiss from a beautiful angel.

His arm started to feel heavy and he felt it
slip from Sara’s shoulder. And then everything went black.

CHAPTER 33

“
NO YOU DON’T!” Sara cried. She grabbed
the belt at the back of Dagger’s pants, lifted him from the floor,
and with the guard’s weapon under one arm, she half carried, half
dragged him across the room to the waiting elevator. As the
cylinder-shaped door closed, she heard the parting
announcement:

“
THIS FACILITY WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN
TWO MINUTES.”