Forced Pair Read online

  “And this means what for me?”

  “Chisholme is behind pretty much everything eTech. And then there’s this.” Fischer waved his right hand in front of him and a picture dated nearly fifteen years ago swept across the screens to occupy the whole of the central monitor. It was a group of eight people. Four on the right wore traditional white lab coats. Two next to them wore double-breasted black suits with white pinstripes and deep-blue matching ties. The last two were in decked-out military uniforms. Guns, medals, lapels, polished boots, and DUUP patches on their left and right arms.

  Fischer turned his head to regard Dent and said, “This was taken in SoCal. Some medical facility closed down six years ago. The place was dedicated to studying and combating many mental illnesses. Some political rights activists claimed the experiments conducted by the facility were less than humane, got the place shut down.” He took a breath. “So, you recognize anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  When Dent failed to expand on his answer, the techie offered, “I know that the pregnant Japanese woman to the far right became Chisholme’s number-two gal — and then his number-one rival. She eventually started and, to this day, still runs Takeda Int’l. Next to her, with his arm around her waist and begging for a sexual harassment lawsuit, is our man, Chisholme. The rest I don’t know.”

  “The suits are government officials,” Dent offered. “And one of the DUUPers, the one slightly behind the other, that’s the man who took me under his wing. He became my XO and taught me all the necessary skills to be an effective soldier. He then burned me.”

  “Whoa. So now what do you want to do? What are your plans?”

  “I don’t know. I do know that the payment terms of my contract had been altered by Chisholme, and as my employer, he should have made that known to me. He owes me payment and an explanation.”

  “So you stole the package in response? That wasn’t a very smart thing to do. A man like Chisholme is like a grandmaster at chess. Except not only can he see five moves ahead, he simply kills his opponents so he doesn’t have to make a single one of those moves. Not someone I’d want to go up against. Neither should you.”

  “We had a binding contract,” said Dent. “He broke protocol and changed the terms so I kept the package. As long as I have the package, I have the required leverage to force him to abide by the original contract.”

  “Plus, he won’t kill you if you keep the girl hidden from him.”

  “That was my train of thought, yes.”

  “And your train had a stop here, letting off one passenger?”

  Dent stared into the man’s eyes. He didn’t understand the man’s question. Perhaps it was technical jargon.

  “I meant,” Fischer said a touch too loudly, “that you planned on leaving the girl here while you paid a personal visit to Chisholme. That was your logical play of events.”

  “Yes. You have my employer’s current address. I’ll go to him first, ask him firsthand why things did not occur as they were planned.” He looked at the photo again. Chisholme and Takeda, friends years ago, and now bitter rivals. Dent had just stolen from one to benefit the other. And Dent’s handler, his liaison between employer and employee, was involved. He knew this for a fact now. He had lied to Dent on the phone regarding the airport outage and intended to have Dent eliminated at the package’s drop off. And Dent had just learned from the photograph on the screen that his handler apparently knew all parties involved. He was the Filipino-American government man wearing one of the pinstripe suits.

  Dent asked Fischer if it was safe to leave the package there.

  “There would be no better place to hide her,” the techie said as he leaned back with his hands folded behind his head. “There’s no way anybody could penetrate my defenses. This place is hidden from all surveillance equipment. Even phone calls made from this bunker can’t be traced.”

  Dent thought the man may have been lying. All phone calls could be traced. They may employ signal scramblers designed to delay the track, but they could still be tracked. That’s why EBs were so widely preferred. They were designed to interpret data via the internet without actually pinging back out, masking their user’s location, securing their privacy.

  The techie sniffed loudly at Dent and then abruptly got up. He walked over to the blanket-covered heap between the two men and the package. He pulled back the cover, sending up a shower of dust particles as he did. A large, heavy looking metal box was revealed. It looked like more than a few computers had been bastardized to create a large, four-by-three-by-three conglomerate machine. The techie patted it gently, like Dent had seen some parents do with their children.

  “This baby makes sure that if anyone gets too close, they won’t get any closer,” he explained to Dent. “Once it’s powered up, it creates a field a city-block wide that effectively bends all non-visual wavelengths. It’s also capable of overriding any known technology with pairing capabilities.”

  Dent could only look at the brushed metal finish of the thing.

  “Plus,” Fischer said with a wink, “it makes a great docking station for mp3 and -4 players.”

  The techie obviously thought this was defense enough against prying eyes of the electronic sort and Dent conceded to the man’s knowledge in this field. But, there was one more issue of defense to cover. “What about boots-to-the-ground surveillance?”

  “Ah. Even better,” the techie said quickly. He pointed back the way Dent and the package had come and said, “The eField up there? Best there is in the business.”

  “Illegal business,” Dent corrected him.

  Without a second thought the techie declared, “Still, it’s the best.”

  “What makes it the best?”

  “It’s a two-fer. I’ve combined two base emotions in the pulse.”

  “But from my knowledge that is impossible,” Dent disagreed. “Too many variables to be effective.”

  The techie turned his head so he was staring at the package as she sat there watching a western movie on one of the nearby screens. “So they say.”

  “And what is your impossible eField?”

  The techie’s lips parted wide and he said in a much heavier tone than his normal one, “Apathy and hunger.”

  “And it’s effective?”

  “Incredibly so. Not only does it subtly convince the intruder that whatever they’d originally intended to do when they came here no longer mattered, it entices them to be on their merry way in search of sustenance. Although ….”

  Dent correctly read the social cue and offered an appropriate, “Although what?”

  “Well, now that you ask, it does need some work to figure out the bugs. It’s not an exact science, this emotion-forcing. I had one incident when a young teenage couple wandered a bit too close to the eField. After a little bit of confusion, they reacted, well … they actually tried sampling some of the local foliage. And then they fell to a more basic drive, a different type of hunger. I had to turn off my camera for a good thirty minutes.”

  Dent was lost.

  “He means that they did it, Dent. Sheesh!”

  Dent looked to the eavesdropping girl and then to the techie. Both wore similar grinning expressions.

  The techie raised his manicured brows at the package and whispered, “And they were apathetic about it!”

  For some reason, the package laughed at this.

  XII

  Dent was loaded up with the essentials. He had his two biometric palm-ID Glocks, his EB, and a phone with an encoded military SIM card. He’d left the nonessentials back at Fischer’s sanctuary — NVG’s, as it was the middle of the day, two ARs that had been stored in his trunk, and the package. Fischer provided a few other items that may come in handy, complete with a run-of-the-mill backpack to put them in.

  It was less than a forty-minute drive to the gated six-acre community on the outskirts of Diamond Bar. Dent was parked in a residential neighborhood one block over and across the four-lane street that defined the western e
dge of the sprawling community. The place was so large that he’d had Fischer download the map to his EB. Along with the community map was the floor plan of Grant Chisholme’s palatial estate. In California, no matter how wealthy you were, any changes or additions made to your place of residence required the proper sign-off by contractors and city officials, as well as the community’s own form of a homeowners’ association. And it was because of this that Dent now had a detailed layout of Chisholme’s four-story mansion. The added elevators, the second kitchen added upstairs, the temperature-controlled wine cellar below the mansion, and even the sixty-eight-step wooden stairway that led from the eastern patio down a pine and eucalyptus covered slope to the small pond that was shared by six neighboring houses.

  It was no problem, once he’d shouldered his backpack, to scale the twelve-foot metal fence near the street. Then, it was simply a matter of navigating his way around the community by use of the downloaded map, cutting through three heavily vegetated hills, to finally find himself a stone’s throw away from the mirrored glass, gleaming marble, detailed stone, and wood building that housed one of the most influential people in Southern California, possibly even the entire country.

  He shrugged off one shoulder strap and rifled through the backpack. The items Fischer had recommended clinked gently together. A white-powder smoke grenade, an EMP grenade, and an ePulse fuse which Fischer said should produce a lethargic eField within a twenty-foot radius once triggered. The smoke grenade — which never once had he had need of such an item in his entire military life — and the EMP grenade seemed pointless items. In his early years in military training, one of his barracks mates had accidentally set off a white-powder smoke grenade inside the shared barracks. It took weeks of cleaning before the entire squad had finally managed to erase all evidence of the fine white powder that clung to everything and permeated every nook and cranny in the large barracks.

  He could think of no possible situation in which the smoke would be a necessary tool and the EMP, if used first, would render the smoke grenade inefficient, as well as the ID palm readers on both of his side-holstered firearms. The binoculars, though, were useful.

  Resetting the backpack, Dent put binocs to his eyes with one hand while shadowing the front lenses with the other. He ran a methodical sweep of the grounds, which only had squared hedges along its perimeter to denote Chisholme’s private estate to any neighbors. The hedges seemed quite pointless as his nearest neighbor was a two-and-a-half minute car drive away. But the telltale pinpoints of blue light — evident even in the full wash of the sun — that spanned the entire perimeter would prove quite effective at keeping unwanted visitors out.

  Unfortunately, that did not apply to him. He was indeed unwanted, but the eField would prove quite ineffective at keeping someone like him out.

  He continued his sweep. Three roving men this side of the building. They were dressed casually, walked casually, but Dent immediately knew them for what they were.

  They were dressed casually, but identically so. Each man wore loose, beige cargo pants, expensive leather belts that cost more than Dent spent on an entire summer-season wardrobe, dark brown Danner military boots, and mauve polo shirts, untucked and exactly one size bigger than what the men would normally wear. Easier to hide as well as quickly retrieve the concealed firearm tucked into the small of their backs. And they walked casually, but alone, not together. Dent was not adept at social norms, but even he knew that more than two people walking the same grounds and deciding to walk apart was not rational. And no person in his right mind would be walking around in the heat in the first place.

  Dent slipped the binoculars over his shoulder and into his pack and walked toward the mansion.

  In the heat.

  He used the trees as suitable cover as he closed in on the nearest sentry. The flaw with Chisholme’s defenses was that two of the roving men were on this side of the eField. Once he’d killed both of them the other man posted to this sector would have no clue what had transpired. The eField isolated the men from one another. Only periodic check-ins, by two-way or by phone, would keep the men connected. All Dent had to do was wait for the two men on this side of the eField to perform their scheduled ‘sitrep’ stating all was clear and then he had until the next scheduled check-in to infiltrate the mansion.

  Dent settled his butt on his heels and stared at the closest guard. The casually-dressed man nonchalantly walked by in front of Dent no more than fifteen feet from his location. The first check-in came at 12:15. He waited for the next.

  12:30 on the dot and the man checked-in again.

  Fifteen minutes to eliminate the outer threats, move on to the inner threat, and enter the mansion via French doors facing a small garden of rose trees and poor man’s asparagus. Dent knew these men were simply doing their job and had no direct relationship to everything that had occurred in the past week, but Chisholme had changed the arrangement and by doing so was now considered hostile. And those employed by a hostile to protect said hostile were by association hostile.

  Dent pulled his right and then left Glocks and rose, putting his back to the peeling bark of a large eucalyptus tree that was five feet further ahead. And when he heard the boots scuffling toward him in a predetermined path, he took a steadying breath. The expected scuffling began to lead away and that was when Dent rounded the tree without a sound and one-tap, one-dropped the man with a silenced shot to the base of his retreating skull.

  Dent did not bother concealing the body. The landscaped natural vegetation did that for him. It was easy for Dent to wind his way closer to the eField by following the well-trodden path. It was even easier to lie down next to a Japanese boxwood and wait for the second sentry to make his way over a small rise. One shot to the man’s head three seconds after it had appeared ended this part of the infiltration.

  He rose, cleared yellow-tinged leaves from his pants and pack, and strode forward. He passed one of the small blue lights, heard it humming as it ineffectively did what it was meant to, and prepared to confront the final sentry this side of the mansion. He tucked himself between a storage shed and a large propane gas tank. From the smell coming from the open window of the shed, it was used for pool and Jacuzzi maintenance. He waited, eyes on the glass-and-wood doors that would be his point of entry.

  After a one-hundred-and-fifty count, the sentry had not appeared. Dent peered around the shed in the direction of where he expected the man to have approached.

  Nothing.

  But then he heard a distinct ting-ting-ting noise in that very direction and knew the reason why the sentry failed to appear. He leaned forward and found what he had expected to see. The man was tucked in between the concealment of grasping jasmine vines, playing a game on his EB. Dent left him to it and made for the mansion. The sentry would be leaving today on his own two feet and not in a body bag because he was a lazy, incompetent employee.

  Dent found the doors to be locked, but by a simple latch that lifted free when he slid his knife between the two doors. Once inside, he closed and locked the doors behind him and made his way to the grand foyer. He ignored the art and furniture and polished metal displayed around him in what he could only assume to be museum-like.

  There was chatter coming though the single door to his right. This would be from the kitchen behind the wall. Civilians, no doubt. As he made his way to the front of the house he stopped and pushed up against a wall, between a statue of half a horse and one of an ocean wave. Or a bird’s wing. Or perhaps it was intended to be a blanket in the wind.

  He listened.

  He could hear the gushing of water from two separate sources and the hushed conversation between man and woman. Beyond this wall was the central foyer, the main entrance to the mansion. Armed guards were posted outside the wide entryway doors. Another flaw in Chisholme’s defenses. With a majority of his hired men outside the mansion walls, it made it easier for an infiltrator who was inside the walls to complete his mission relatively unhindered.

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sp; He waited until he heard the conversation on the other side of the wall pick up, waited to hear key pitches and tones that signified the speaker was fully engaged. And then he made his move. It had been mapped out beforehand. There were two indoor marble fountains between the main entry door and the double-wide staircase leading upstairs and there would likely be two guards positioned on the right side of the staircase.

  When he stepped fully into the foyer, he found he had been absolutely correct on those two counts. He had planned perfectly in that respect. What he had not planned on was the other pair of guards sitting behind a curved recess to the right of the staircase. They were listening quietly to the standing man speak to the standing woman.

  They stopped listening when the woman’s neck erupted a split second before the talkative man’s face painted the wall behind him.

  They stopped listening, and started firing.

  XIII

  A rapid exchange of gunfire erupted in the foyer. Dent had not planned on two more hostiles being at this location — at least not immediately. He was forced to drop back and duck behind the closest marble fountain, the one on the right, to avoid being wounded.

  A few bullets aimed his way sent stone chips into the air and a few more slammed into the high-density glass in the front entryway doors resulting in a myriad of spider web cracks. Other hostiles would be arriving soon, but not through the front doors if they were highly trained. The doors may be the quickest way to reach him, but it would also put them in direct line of fire from their associates, not to mention Dent himself.

  He could hear static voices from two-ways over the occasional shots fired his way, no doubt a secondary team reporting their location and intent to join the fray.