RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (33 page)

As he looked back up at Slade sitting there in the dark, he was fairly sure his fate was sealed, but he tried to negotiate anyway.
         “Mr. Slade, Please, just give me another chance.  I’m sure the security system went off due to some malfunction.  I swear I was in and out clean.  I swear to you, I did not trip that alarm.” 

Slade was silent for what seemed like a long time.
         “Listen you little rat!”  His booming voice instantly filled the room.      “Do you realize what you’ve done?  Dodge Kerrington was in the palm of my hand, I had the perfect situation.  Those people talked constantly.  Sooner or later I would have obtained the information that I needed without having to deal with them personally.  Do you have any idea how much I detest dealing with people?” 

“Now, I’ll probably have to kill him, but first I’ll have to torture him to get what I want.  All these unpleasant and unfair things that I am going to have to do to Kerrington are your fault!  Do you know what that means?  It is not ‘I’ that is responsible for their torture and their deaths, no, not at all.  It’s YOUR fault you inconsiderate moron!  YOU and YOU alone are the cause of their deaths, YOU are a murderer!  Do you know what the punishment is for murder?” 

“Please Sir, I’ll do anything.  Please don’t kill me, I’ll do . . .”
         “Shut up!”  Snarled Cyrus, “Pleading will only make your death embarrassing.  Just be quiet and make peace with your fate.  It’s what you deserve.” 

The word deserve was barely out of Cyrus’s mouth as he mashed a button on his keyboard.  The man clutched his head, and began grinding his teeth as he fell forward hitting the floor like a sack of flour.  A large pool of blood formed on the plastic beneath his head.

Slade took a long draw from the cigar and exhaled with a satisfied sigh.  He looked up at the two men standing in the shadows. 

“Don’t just stand there!”  He barked, “Clean up that mess!  And send the man waiting out in the corridor IN on your way OUT.” 

The two suited men quickly folded the plastic around the dead man and carried him out.  Cyrus turned back to his computer console.  The screen displayed a life file residing in the LifeTech database.  He hit the delete key causing a small box to appear.

“Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file?” 

Two buttons were displayed below.

“YES” and “NO.”  He moved the cursor over the “YES” button.
         “Goodbye 726,” he said as he clicked it.”  Another message box appeared.
         “Do you wish to archive a compressed backup of this file?

The same “YES” and “NO” buttons appeared, and an additional message.  Note: Choosing “NO” will result in permanent loss of Restoration Potential.  Proceed with Caution!  Cyrus Chuckled and clicked the “NO” button. 

As he was completing the erasure of blue car man, a very thin, small stature man, entered the office quietly and stood where the plastic lay just a moment earlier. The man was only known as “Glitch.”   He was a notorious hacker that had earned his nick name justly.  He stood there quietly for some time.
         “Sir?”  Cyrus looked up from his console and took a long draw on the cigar.  He blew the smoke out as far as he could so that it reached Glitch’s face causing him to choke a bit.
         “726 is deceased, go to his residence, find his Lifecorder and bring it to the lab, see to it that it’s compromised in an untraceable manner then return it to his residence, I sent his file to you.”
         “Anything else Sir?”
         “Yes, in fact there is, do it without being detected, we have had enough of that.”
         “Of course Sir.”  Glitch turned and left the room without hesitation, he knew Cyrus was not much for conversation and he hated Cyrus anyway, he dreamed of the day when he would collect his half of the money, and never have to see that man again.

Glitch wasn’t really scared of Cyrus, but he knew Slade had to be the Alpha dog or he would never hear the end of it.  After Glitch left, Cyrus pulled up another lifefile on his
PC, it was that of Dodge Kerrington.  He sat there and stared at it for a long time.
         “Well Dodge, I sure hope I don’t have to kill your whole family to get what I want” but if I have to, I certainly will. 

Cyrus Slade was an evil man, he even had an evil sounding name, but a name doesn’t make a man any more that a cover makes a book.  Many bad things had been done to Cyrus that made him what he was, a man filled with hate.  He despised
LifeTech, ESS, and the whole premise of cloning.  He was one of two infants many years earlier that were volunteered into an experimental program, one was Ron Simpson, and the other was Cyrus. 

Cyrus’s parents were German immigrants that had entered the country illegally.  They were desperate for money to bring Cyrus’s two-year-old sister into the country from a hospital in Germany, without medical treatment in the United States she would soon die. 

They needed large sums of money to pay for the exuberant cost of the specialist and the long hospital stay.  They heard that Dr. Simpson sometimes helped people with a special medical need, especially immigrants of German descent.  Ron’s Great, Great, Grand Parents, escaped to freedom during the  holocaust in Germany many years ago.  His family passed the story down and now he was always willing to help others in similar dire straits. 

He paid for the young girl to be brought into the country in exchange for the parents volunteering young Cyrus for their secret cutting edge cloning project.  Something went terribly wrong with Cyrus’s clone and at a young age the clone murdered the parents, his surrogate original and Ron’s original before disappearing. 

He went on to murder Ron Simpson’s clone which was then living as the original Ron and working at ESS.  He also murdered Dr. Simpson and his Wife many years later.  He made each death look accidental.  The older sister died a short time later in spite of all the efforts to save her, probably more from a broken heart than her disease.

As it turned out, Cyrus was the product of a lifefile being transferred into a clone with damaged DNA.  In the current system he would have been euthanized but because he was the first of his kind no one knew how dangerous he would become as he aged.  They wanted to observe him and study him to see if various drugs, shock treatments, or genetic adjustments might
correct his personality disorder and his mental illness, not to mention his physical problems. 

Their lack of caution got them all killed and Cyrus became more deranged and more powerful with each passing year.  Their genetic tampering had made him extremely intelligent, dangerously strong, and highly driven but at the same time without ethics or morals, basically evil. 

He was hell bent on ruling the world, total and complete domination of everyone and all governments.  He needed more information to complete the task; he needed the knowledge inside the heads of two men, John Calhoun and Dodge Kerrington. 

He had to have it; he must obtain it to complete his plan on time.  These two men were the only ones that had the knowledge of the systems vulnerabilities.  He needed the system to be bullet proof and he knew if he picked their brains clean and then erased them there would be no one else with the knowledge and skills to stop him.

The security at ESS was so tight that he couldn’t get into their servers to get the designs for all the equipment he needed.  The names of the men truly behind the genius of the system were locked in there also.  He had blackmailed Ron Simpson with the promise of not murdering him or his parents if he cooperated with him.

Once he got what he needed from Ron he murdered him making it look like an accident.  When Ron’s parents got suspicious that his death was not accidental they hired professional trackers to find Cyrus.  They did find him and they started poking around in his affairs.  He figured out what was going on and snuffed out the trackers one by one.  When he was done with them, he had Ron’s parents killed at sea, making it look like an accident. 

He disappeared again without a trace.  So far he succeeded in covering his tracks and remaining undetected by authorities; they couldn’t even identify the man let alone locate him. 

At present time he truly believed himself to be invincible, but what he didn’t know was that the very men he was watching, the very ones that he believed to be his salvation, were closer to bringing him down than he ever imagined. 

Just outside the old foundry down the alley to the east sat a beat up grey van.  To the average person and even the security systems of Cyrus Slade this vehicle remained undetected.  The Black Ops team members on duty were informed by John that these hackers were not your garden variety criminals and that they had BEYOND the latest technology, the utmost caution would be needed.

The team was keeping the widest parameter possible while still tracking the signal from the hijacked bug.  Two days before the man in the blue car met his fate he dutifully returned the bug from the Kerrington’s kitchen with the alleged dead power cell.  It was sitting in a bin marked “refurb” on the end of a table in the communications lab inside the old foundry. 

The tech responsible for fixing it hadn’t yet.  There it sat emitting a signal that appeared to be random noise to the monitoring system in the compound; it simply blended in with all the other white noise on their monitoring consoles.

The Black Ops in the van decided to keep their loitering to a minimum and left the area after only two hours.  They were being very cautious and rightfully so.  They backed out of the alley without turning on the lights and very quietly and slowly drove away. 

Back at the Calhoun estate John was sitting at his computer console searching for anything he could find on the family of Doctor Simpson and the cloning program.  After much digging he found a partial record of the program deep in the archives of the pentagon’s cold case division.  He couldn’t get into all of it but he had been able to get a name, it was the identity of the second participant in the study.  The name was Cyrus Anthony Slade.
“Yes! Finally a clue, maybe this Cyrus fellow was involved somehow. 

He was reading the details of the file when his phone beeped.  It was a message from the team.

“From: B O, Compound located, team extracted, out clean.  John jumped up out of his chair and did a high kick into the air. “YES, take that hackers!” he yelled, with an added fist pump.  He immediately messaged Dodge without realizing the time.  Then he looked at his watch. 
“Oops, crap!”
It was 2:15 a.m. Dodge still had to go to work in the morning as usual.  John hoped Dodge’s ringer was on low and maybe he would just sleep through it.

Dodge rolled over because something woke him but he didn’t know what.  He was tired from a long day and an even longer  evening that started with rock wall climbing and ended with a break in plus the drama that went with it and then
insomnia from everything going through his head.  He finally drifted off to sleep around 1:30 and now his phone screen was lit.

He retrieved it from his bedside table and looked at the message.
         “Tracker worked!”  He was so elated by what it said.  He really thought their plan might fail due to the security of these hackers being so high.  He wanted to wake Linsey up but she was sleeping so good he didn’t dare It could wait till morning, besides, he couldn’t talk in there anyway.  He shot John back a message.
         “Awesome, talk tomorrow.”

He rolled over and went back to sleep, having more piece of mind. 

The next morning was busy, Dodge called the local security company that John found and informed them that they had a security emergency and that they needed a team out there to the house right away.  Dodge went to the basement with Linsey and turned on the radio.  He told her about John’s message from very early that morning and how John filled him in on all the details first thing when he got up.

The
hackers lair had been located but it was so large that it was more like a compound than anything else so they had already begun calling it just that, the compound.  Unfortunately this probably also meant that they were dealing with a group of individuals and not just one or two hackers.  It was a little unsettling now that this discovery had been made but they still had no idea what size of a group they were dealing with, that remained to be determined.

The current person suspected to be behind all of this was a man named Cyrus Slade.  He explained the whole thing to her and she was just as amazed as he was that their plan to use the hackers bug to find their lair had worked so well. 
         “Why do bad guys always have creepy names?”  Said Linsey as they went back up the stairs.   It made Dodge laugh, but she was right, it was a good question that he couldn’t answer. 

After breakfast, Dodge called Tim at ESS.  He explained the break in and that he was having a new security system installed right away.  He told Tim that the company was coming out today to survey the house and that he would not be in today.  Tim understood and said for him not to worry there was nothing pressing at work today and that work could wait, the safety of his family was more important.

Shortly after calling Tim he received a message from the Black Ops team.  It read:  Blue devil replaced, taxi on duty.  Dodge perceived that the man in the little blue car had been demoted.  Undoubtedly he had been blamed for the security system going off and was relieved of his duties.    Of course neither he nor John would have guessed that their little stunt with the security system got the poor guy killed.  Now the car to watch for was apparently a taxi.