Wired (22 page)

36

 
Desh realized it was time to turn his
attention toward escape. Even though his watch had been removed and he had been
unconscious for an extended period since he had last looked at it, his mind had
somehow kept perfect track of time. It was nearing ten o’clock. Sam’s discussion
had come to a somewhat logical conclusion, and he would need to leave and reset
the booby trap in
Kira’s head. He had no doubt planned to end the
conversation just prior to having to reset his device for dramatic effect.

When
Sam left, would he leave them alone, handcuffed, or would he have them actively
guarded? Desh raced through probabilities and options, considering and
discarding dozens of strategies. His mind seized on one he thought had a good
chance of succeeding. But he would need to interact with the species Homo
sapiens dullard, which meant he had to create an avatar personality of the old
Desh so he could operate on their delayed level and not arouse suspicion.

Sam’s
watch began emitting a series of high-pitched beeps, and he smiled in
satisfaction. He pushed a button on his watch and the beeping stopped. “I’m
afraid I have to go now, my dear,” he said to Kira. “I have a helicopter
waiting for me. And it’s already 9:40. You were unconscious for quite some
time. So before I leave, I need to reset the device in your skull. If I don’t—”
He spread his hands helplessly. “Well, let’s just say that neither of us wants
that.”

He
barked an order and seconds later three plain-clothed men had joined him in the
basement, each holding a tranquilizer gun. Under any other circumstances they
would have been armed with automatic rifles, but Sam was taking no chances that
something would go awry and result in Kira’s death.

Sam
gestured at Smith’s corpse lying in a pool of blood ten feet away. “I’ll call
in a clean-up crew when I’m in the air,” he informed the newcomers. He didn’t
offer any other explanation for the body and the men didn’t ask for one.

Sam
pointed to the tallest of the three men. “Jim here will be in charge when I’m
gone,” he announced to his prisoners. “He’ll take good care of you.” He paused.
“Mr. Desh, I’ll be back to interrogate you tomorrow morning. As much as I would
enjoy slicing off digits and beating you to within an inch of your life, I’m
afraid that truth drugs have become just too damn good to justify this sort of
thing. Oh well,” he said in disappointment. “I’m sure the session will prove
interesting, nonetheless.”

Sam
turned to Kira. “As for you, my dear, you’ll have all the information you’ll
need to confirm the activity of our sterility virus very soon.”

Sam
paused in thought, and a look of mild amusement came over his face. “Jim, if
the girl needs to relieve herself,” he continued, “I want one of you in the
bathroom with her and one of you outside the door. And don’t turn away while
she’s going either. As for Desh here, if he needs to go—” He shrugged. “Let him
pee in his pants.”

With
that Sam turned and walked to the wood staircase. When he reached it, he turned
and faced Kira. “One last thing. Listen for three high-pitched beeps in a few
minutes. This will tell you that your twelve-hour clock has been reset.” He
smiled. “I thought it was considerate of me to provide an audible confirmation
for you. I’m trying to minimize your stress until you’ve come to your senses.”

“Yeah,
you’re a real prince,” said Kira bitterly. She paused. “Look, we’re handcuffed
to a concrete wall. Do you really think you need three guards?”

Sam
looked amused. “Just the fact that you asked the question tells me that I do.” With
that he took a careful look at his watch and rushed up the stairs.

The
three guards fanned out in the basement at equal distance from the prisoners.

Kira
turned toward Desh with an alarmed look in her eye. There was no getting out of
this situation. Moriarty, or Sam, or whoever he was, had won. He had an
explosive charge planted in her head and a knife at the throat of the entire
species. The situation was hopeless.

Desh
winked. The gesture had been completed so quickly she had almost missed it, but
it was unmistakable. She wrinkled her forehead in confusion. What did he know
that she didn’t?

It
was time. Desh instructed sweat to exit the pores in his face, and in less than
a minute moisture started to bead on his forehead and cheeks. At the same time,
at his command, the color drained from his face and lips. He moaned softly.

Hearing
the prisoner moan, the guard nearest Desh studied him more closely. “Jesus,” he
said to his companions. “This guy is sweating like a pig. He looks like death.”

“I
need a doctor,” gasped Desh, the avatar personality he had set up ensuring he
said the words in character and with mind-numbing slowness.

Kira
struggled to make sense of what was happening. She would have been sure he had
come down with the mother of all fevers if it had not been for its sudden onset
and the wink he had given her. So this must have been planned. But the sweat
sliding down his face was real. They were in a basement and the air was
currently cool and dry. No one could cause themselves to sweat. This couldn’t
be faked. Unless . . .

She
glanced down at her chest and stifled a gasp.
The locket was gone
.

Her
eyes widened.

The
guard named Jim, stationed between his two colleagues, peered at Desh
uncomfortably. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.

“Don’t
know,” uttered Desh feebly. “Gonna vomit,” he whispered. “Bathroom. Please.”

“It’s
a trick,” said the guard closest to Desh. “It has to be.”

“Brilliant
conclusion,” said Kira mockingly, rolling her eyes. “Can’t you tell when
someone’s feverish? How the hell could it be a trick?” She shook her head in
disgust. “Look at him! You can’t fake that.”

Desh
moved his head forward and swallowed hard several times, as if fighting a gag
reflex.

“In
another few minutes he’ll be covered in vomit!” pressed Kira. “Are you prepared
to live with that smell all night? You think your psychotic boss will be happy
about this when he returns?”

Jim
frowned miserably. “Ken,” he said, nodding at the guard closest to Desh, “cut
him loose. And get him to a toilet.”

Ken
hesitated.

“Hurry!”
barked Jim.

Desh
moaned as Ken approached, pulling a combat knife from his belt. The other two
guards raised their guns and trained them steadily on Desh, as Ken reached
behind him and cut through the tough plastic of his restraint, which fell to
the ground, and returned the knife to his belt.

Desh
grunted in pain as he rose unsteadily to his feet, hunched over and clutching
at his stomach. He glanced at the other two guards. Ken began escorting him to
the stairs. When Desh was halfway there, he bent over and made a loud, throaty,
heaving sound, as though a week’s worth of stomach contents were erupting from
his throat.

The
guards all glanced away, just for a moment, in disgust.

Desh moved
. He snatched Ken’s knife with
a speed and precision that could never be equaled by a normal man and flicked
it toward the guard farthest from him with a smooth, practiced motion. The
knife buried itself deep in the guard’s chest. The instant Desh released the
knife he spun Ken to his right and into the path of the tranquilizer dart that
Jim had sent racing toward him. Desh threw his human shield forward and into
Jim in front of him, who shoved the dead weight of his tranquilized colleague
violently to the concrete floor. As he did so, Desh was on him immediately,
landing a vicious kick to his arm and sending his gun flying. The guard
attempted a knifehand strike to Desh’s throat in combination with a palmhand
blow to his nose, but Desh blocked both attempts easily. He had read the
guard’s body language so precisely he knew the man’s intentions before he had
begun to move.

Desh
now read Jim’s defensive posture, and spotting an opening, wheeled around and
landed a roundhouse kick on the guard’s chest, exploding him back against the
staircase. Even as the kick was landing Desh calculated the exact distance to
the staircase and the exact speed and force he would need to exert to achieve
his goal. As the man’s head cracked against the staircase, he crumpled to the
ground, unconscious, and Desh knew his calculations had been perfect.

Desh
snatched Jim’s tranquilizer gun from the floor, stepped over Ken’s body, and
crouched low under the open staircase. As he had expected, the guard who had
remained upstairs bolted through the door to the basement and down several
stairs holding an automatic rifle out in front of him. So much for non-lethal
force, thought Desh.

The
man expertly covered the staircase and entire basement with his gun. He took in
the sight of Kira, still bound, and four bodies sprawled on the floor, but
could detect no other movement, which he immediately realized suggested his
adversary was hidden under the staircase.

His
realization came far too late.

Desh
casually sent a dart at point blank range through the opening between two
stairs and into the guard’s leg. He collapsed and slid down four stairs before
finally coming to a stop.

Desh
was expert in several forms of hand-to-hand combat, and long practice had made
his movements precise and cobra-strike quick. And this was
before
his
mind was enhanced. With his thoughts so vastly accelerated, the guards’
quickest movements had appeared almost deliberate to him. He had been
outnumbered four to one and he knew it hadn’t been a fair fight—for the four
guards.

Desh
rushed over to Kira. As he was cutting her free three loud, piercing tones
emanated from her skull, startling her but having no effect on him.

Perfect,
he thought. His timing had been exact. He ordered the sweat to cease pouring
from his face and his blood to flow normally, and the color quickly returned to
his face.
He considered if Kira
could assimilate his speech if he
sped it up to more closely match his thoughts, but ruled it out: as intelligent
as she was, he would need to continue to relegate a portion of his mind to
creating a simulacrum of his old self.

“Are
you sure you want to go?” he asked. “You’ll need to be sure Sam resets his
device by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Kira
nodded defiantly. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

Desh
took her hand and led her through the obstacle course of scattered bodies and
up the stairs. Sam had said there were four guards, but Desh wasn’t about to
trust this number. He cautiously peered around the door, counting on his
enhanced reaction time to get him safely through any ambushes. There were none.

They
found themselves in the kitchen. “Wait here,” said Desh.

Before
Kira could respond, he rushed off and canvassed the entire house, confirming
they were alone, and returned to her a few minutes later. “I want to check the
men downstairs for identification. I doubt I’ll find any but it’s worth thirty
seconds.”

Desh
bounded off and down the stairs, closing the door quietly behind him. He pulled
the knife from where he had implanted it in the guard’s chest and checked for
the man’s pulse. He was dead. Desh knelt beside the unconscious men, two in the
basement and one on the staircase, and slit each of their throats in turn,
careful not to get any blood on himself.

He
isolated the memory of these murders and created a temporary dead zone in his
mind so they would be hidden when he returned to his vastly inferior normal
state, ensuring he would not be improperly burdened by them. He knew that the
emotional, un-enhanced version of himself would never sanction the murders of
helpless men.

This
other Desh was an idiot!

The
enhanced version had just ensured that when Sam returned, he would get zero
information as to how they had escaped. They needed to keep Sam as off-balanced
as possible. The more confused he was, the more intimidated by their magical
escape artistry, the better chance they would have.

The
stakes were simply too high for squeamishness.

37

Desh
rejoined Kira on the first floor. “Did they have any ID?” she asked.

Desh
shook his head. “None.”

“Doesn’t
surprise me,” she said. “Good news, though. I found our personal items and cell
phones in a kitchen drawer.”

She
held out his watch and cell phone and he took them gratefully. “Good work,” he
said as he slid his watch back around his wrist.

The
fraction of Desh’s mind he had used to set up a simulacrum of his slow self
waited patiently for the second-and-a-half he expected to pass before
Kira’s
next utterance. The rest of his mind continued to race at fantastic speed,
following several trains of thought simultaneously. One train of thought
involved their escape. He had learned how to hot-wire a car as part of his
general “surviving with what was at hand” training, and he isolated these
memories and amplified them in case he turned back into a pumpkin before
locating a suitable car.

“Let’s
get out of here,” suggested Kira. “We have to stop this sick bastard,” she
added with determination. “And we don’t have much time.”

Desh
computed a number of probabilities almost simultaneously. The probability that
homing devices had been planted on them or their retrieved personal items. The
probability there was detection equipment at hand. The odds that they would
find this equipment if it was here, and the amount of time this could be
expected to require. The increased risk they were taking with every second they
remained where they were. He input all of these figures into a complex equation
that he solved the instant it had been formulated: one course of action was
optimal—but just slightly. He transmitted the result to his puppet personality.

Desh
held up a hand. “Not just yet. Sam thought escape was impossible, so my gut
tells me he didn’t plant homing devices on us. Odds are he put the device in
your head just to be on the safe side and for intimidation purposes. But we
need to be sure. We’re in a safe house, so there must be bug detection
equipment here somewhere. Let’s find it.”

They
separated and ransacked the house at breakneck speed, tearing through closets
and dumping the contents of drawers onto nearby floors. Only four minutes later,
Desh found a case in a bedroom closet containing instruments for detecting both
homing and listening devices.

He
hurriedly scanned both Kira and himself, along with their phones and other
personal items. Everything was clean. He checked carefully around Kira’s
bandage for any signals but detected none.

They
cautiously exited the house, wishing they had night vision equipment as they
made their way through the darkness, punctuated by the lights from other houses
in the neighborhood. Several streets over Desh found an old car that was
susceptible to being hot-wired and quickly did so, performing the procedure by
the dim light of his open cell phone. He was just pulling away from the curb
when—like a hundred billion rubber bands snapping back into their original
shape—his hyper-intelligence vanished.

Desh
gasped out loud as if he had been hit in the stomach.

Kira
glanced at him and nodded knowingly. “Welcome back to the world of the
feeble-minded.”

He
wore an expression of complete disconsolation. “I feel like I’ve just been
blinded,” he whispered

She
nodded. “Ten minutes from now it will all seem like a dream and you won’t miss
it so much.”

Desh
searched his memory. Had he retained
anything
? He was relieved to find
that several of the ideas he had had while enhanced were still with him,
although the underlying logic he had used to arrive at these concepts was
either gone or far beyond his ability to comprehend. Desh forced himself to
stop pining for lost brilliance. Time was short.

He
gasped again.

He
had remembered yet another surprising conclusion reached by his super
intelligent alter ego:
he was in love with Kira Miller
.

“What
is it?” asked Kira anxiously.

Desh
turned to her. He looked into her dazzling blue eyes, and now that his alter
ego had shined a spotlight on his emotions he realized it was true: he
was
in love. Or infatuated at any rate. His entire being basked in her presence. She
was like a drug to which he had become hopelessly addicted without his
knowledge or consent. The rewards of breathless intellect were great, but the
primitive lizard brain manufactured rewards of its own. “Nothing,” whispered
Desh. “Sorry.”

Kira
looked puzzled but let the subject drop.

Desh
knew he could continue to gaze at her beautiful face forever. She truly was an
extraordinary woman. But now was not the time to give into these irrational
impulses. Now was the time to focus on one thing only: survival.

Desh
tore his eyes away from her and focused on the road. “How’s your head?” he
asked worriedly.

“It’s
getting better,” she said unconvincingly.

Desh
suspected she was lying but decided to leave the subject alone. “It won’t be
long before Sam discovers what happened at the safe house and points a
satellite this way,” he said. “So in the immediate term, we have to get as far
away from this spot as possible.” As if to emphasize his point he stepped hard
on the accelerator.

“And
the not so immediate term?”

“We
need to elevate our game. It’s time for more desperate measures. And for that
we need Connelly.”

In
response, Kira pulled out her cell phone, the partner to the one she had given
Connelly, and flipped it open.

“You’re
certain the signal can’t be unscrambled?” said Desh.

“Absolutely
positive,” she confirmed. She hit a speed dial button and handed the phone to
Desh.

The
colonel answered on the first ring and they exchanged greetings.

“What
the hell happened to you two?” asked Connelly worriedly.

Desh
frowned. “Sorry about the radio silence. We ran into trouble but we’re clear
now—as far as we know. Assume this is a private channel. What’s your status?”

“We’re
still with my doctor friend at his house,” reported Connelly immediately. “I’ve
been patched up and filled with blood and pain-killers. I’ve gotten plenty of
sleep and am recovering nicely. And Matt has brought me up to speed on events.”

“Understood,”
said Desh. “I now have a much clearer picture of what we’re dealing with than I
had when we separated. I’ll brief you further as soon as I can. Bottom line is
that I’m now absolutely convinced Kira is innocent and an ally. But a lot of
really bad shit is about to happen if we don’t move quickly.”

“How
bad?”

“Bad
enough to make me wish for the original Ebola plot you told me about.” He
didn't wait for the colonel's reply. “The soldiers in the clearing were told
you’d gone rogue. Was it just these men who were misinformed, or is it more
widespread?”

“It
probably wasn’t initially, but it sure is now. They’ve poisoned the entire
well. The military is convinced I’m a traitor and will do whatever is necessary
to bring me down.”

“Understood,”
said Desh. “You trusted this doctor with your life. Anyone at Bragg you would
trust with your life who can fly a chopper; and has access?”

Connelly
considered. “Yes.”

Desh
sighed. “Let me put this another way. Anyone at Bragg who would trust you with
their
life. Someone who will believe you’ve been framed and will risk their career
and life to stick by you.” Moriarty would have made sure the misinformation he
had put out to frame Connelly had been devastating and airtight. It would take
quite a man to put the trust of a friend over damning information put forth by
the highest levels of legitimate military authority.

There
was a long pause. “I’m as sure as I can be,” replied Connelly. “But I guess
we’re going to find out,” he added evenly.

“Make
sure to throw all the weaponry and any other military equipment you can find
into the chopper before you leave,” said Desh. “We don’t know exactly what
we’ll need, so the more the merrier.” He paused. “Not to put any added pressure
on you,” continued Desh soberly, “but getting this chopper is mission critical.
I’ll brief you fully when I see you, but trust me: the stakes
couldn’t
be any higher.”

“Understood,”
said Connelly grimly.

“Good
luck, Colonel,” said Desh. “Call me when you’re in the air and we can choose a
rendezvous point.”

“Roger
that,” said Connelly somberly as the connection ended.