I didn’t just let a million-dollar aircraft be destroyed.
“Sorry, sir. We have nothing. Not even beacons are active.”
Completely destroyed, Jason thought. Yet that meant the wreckage and the two missiles were just waiting to be scavenged. Along with the evidence that the U.S.A. was snooping in another nation’s affairs.
Subjects didn’t arrive at this facility in ambulances; they came in cages.
The discovery settled inside her with a harsh weight before she realized this was why they were pressuring her to sign off on a completion. They needed to cover their butts because they’d already done it. Oh, jeez. Her tail would be in the fire if anything went wrong too.
Human volunteers. Did they even know the dangers? Her mind filled with all the problems, the risks, and she started to get up to go find Cook or Yates and call them on it, but she stopped. If they kept this from her, what else did they do without her knowledge?
Their betrayal worked under her skin, the wound tearing and burning to anger.
Damn them. She stared at the computer. She needed to know more, anything, everything—and she knew where to find it. She drew in a lungful of air, fingers poised over the keyboard. This was a violation of the worst kind, and for a moment she asked herself why she was risking everything for four men she didn’t know.
I created it. I’m responsible.
She kicked off her shoes and plunged into accessing files, using back doors. She knew computers, especially military computers. She’d worked on them from inside the Pentagon. She pried into Yates’s personal files, and read the data about the men. Candidates, Yates called them. Names listed with the vial numbers this time. It made them real to her. Young men. God, who would volunteer for this? It was madness till it was thoroughly tested.
Get off that horse, girl, it’s dead and buried.
Implantation was a couple of weeks ago, status deemed excellent. No side effects. Like Boris. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was fine and she was concerned over nothing. Which would be a real feather in her own cap. Prove me wrong, she thought as she read Francine’s personal notes, written on an iPod, then downloaded, but it hadn’t been turned to type font yet. Her handwriting stank. But the last entry made her breath catch.
Released for mission status.
No monitoring? She closed all the files, erased the trace, and then went to level five, into the Pentagon. She was denied twice. That would start a trace to this computer. Her fingers flew over the keyboard so fast her hands hurt. She’d never get inside in time and went into the colonel’s file. Only problem was if he was sitting at his desk, he’d know it.
Come on, give it up, Cook, she thought. This type of data wasn’t recorded, not with any easy access, but Clancy knew where she was going. I should have done this a long time ago. She scrolled and read, closing one only to open another.
She found one under an odd title. Crash and burn. Someone had a sick sense of humor. She opened it. Colonel Cook was being kept apprised of the candidate’s status, sleep, food, stress, training—mission status. Active.
Oh God, they were on one already. Where? Where? she thought, reading frantically, wanting to print it all, yet eager to find where the men were right now. A cluster of words popped out and she zeroed in. Ecuador–Peru border, recon for a downed UAV, and the four men matched the candidates in the other file. Bingo.
She opened their service record files. Young, physically fit, and extremely well trained. A good portion was blacked out. Special Operations, black ops, she suspected, then sent the photos and stat sheets to the printer before she cleared traces, even the echoes. She was reaching for the sheets when the door locks clicked with access. It swung open and she grabbed the papers and stuffed them under the keyboard.
Dr. Francine Yates entered first, followed by two soldiers. Clancy thought about ducking for cover, but nixed that. She had a right to be here, and cleared her throat. The click of pistols and “freeze” came before the lights blinked on. The soldiers relaxed, their expressions unapologetic.
Francine looked over her and the lab. “I will never understand you and this need to work in the dark, Clancy.”
“It buffers out distractions and I think better. Why do you need armed guards, Francine?”
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“Clearly. I was just running another sample.” She gestured to the screen. “I wanted to sleep in tomorrow. Blood is drawn.”
Francine mulled that over for a second. “Any changes?”
“It’s working, if that’s what you mean.” Her gaze flicked to the soldiers.
“Go ahead,” Yates said to the men, and the pair moved to the large orangutan cage.
“Whoa, wait a second. Where are you going with Boris?” Clancy snapped off her latex gloves, but stayed where she was. If she didn’t get the computer to reboot, then any geek with some skills could find out what she’d done—and learned.
The men didn’t respond, and rolled the cage toward the door.
“You really should stop naming the test animals, Clancy, and he’s going to surgery.”
Her eyes went wide and her gaze darted to the cage and the sleeping giant inside. “But there’s nothing wrong with him.”
“We need to see the progress on his brain while his heart is still beating.” She said it as if there were no questioning her decision.
Okay, that was logical, the icky part Clancy didn’t want to consider, but why right now? “But we haven’t finished the stress and hydration test on him yet. You open up his skull and, provided he lives, you have weeks of recovery.” This made no sense.
“Perhaps, but there are other apes and I have orders.”
Ah, so that was it. “Colonel Cook ordered this?” Cook was a stickler for regulations, to have all his ducks in a neat row, and though he was pressuring her to change her views on the timelines, he respected her cautions. She reached for the phone.
“Clancy, don’t.” Francine took a step nearer. “He’s not happy. Let him cool off.”
Francine’s tone warned that if she pushed she could be out of a job, and Clancy heeded it. If you don’t play with the team, they’ll trade you. Or kick you out. Clancy couldn’t afford not to be here right now. Not with what she knew now. She was the only one thinking clearly apparently. But she wasn’t a doctor with a list of PhDs, and therefore she was expendable. Although Clancy created the microtechnology, she didn’t own it. The military research and development did, and that meant the U.S. government held the schematics and the patents. To get this job she’d signed a “fork it over and keep your mouth shut at all times” statement. Fine for her, she had no one to blab to anyway.
Yet she had a feeling that being on the cutting edge of science was about to get her hacked to pieces.
“The colonel made it clear that we can’t have anyone on this project who’ll refuse orders.”
Clancy gave her a look that always got her in trouble as a kid. “You know, Francine,
