Splinter Self Read online

  Contents

  Splinter Self

  Copyright

  Books by S.L. Shelton

  Dedication

  Dear Reader,

  one - April 24th

  two - April 25th

  three - April 26th

  four - April 27th

  five - April 28th

  six - April 29th

  seven - April 30th

  eight - May 1st

  nine - May 2nd

  ten - May 3rd

  eleven - May 4th

  twelve - May 5th

  thirteen - May 6th

  fourteen - May 7th

  fifteen - May 8th

  sixteen - May 9th

  seventeen - May 10th to 12th

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Splinter Self

  SPLINTER SELF

  by S.L. Shelton

  Copyright 2017, S.L. Shelton

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by S.L. Shelton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Front cover, maps, and artwork contained in this book are Copyright © S.L. Shelton

  Books by S.L. Shelton:

  Hedged

  The Scott Wolfe Series:

  Waking Wolfe

  Unexpected Gaines

  Danger Close

  Wolfe Trap

  Harbinger

  Predator’s Game

  Splinter Self

  Back story: Lt. Marsh

  Follow S.L. Shelton at:

  wolfeauthor.wordpress.com

  www.goodreads.com/WolfeWriter

  facebook.com/SLShelton.Author

  SLShelton.com

  For Diane

  Without you, there’d be no me.

  Dear Reader,

  The last book in the Scott Wolfe Series has been a long time coming. It’s been two years since Predator’s Game was released. Little did I know as Predator’s Game hit the charts that the illness my beloved wife Diane, my Gretel, had been suffering was in fact a rare and aggressive cancer.

  All production work stopped with the diagnosis in 2016.

  As we slowly pushed to get her to remission, she began to likewise push me to finish the series. I struggled to balance the roles of caregiver, husband, and author. Needless to say, caregiver won out over both husband and author for a long time.

  When she reached the end of her treatments this past summer, she insisted I return to my writing desk and give Scott Wolfe the epic conclusion he deserved.

  I hope you enjoy the result of that two year endeavor. Thank you for following me and Scott (and my Diane) through the years. It is my fondest wish to continue writing for you. I hope the universe feels the same.

  Very best regards,

  S.L. Shelton

  Author

  NOTE: Descriptions of facilities in this novel have been fictionalized for reasons of security and to reduce the number of future encounters the author might have with federal officers.

  one

  Sunday, April 24th, 2011

  The middle of the night—sort of.

  Despite the dark, the sand remained warm from the tropical sun baking it all day. I lay on the ground, the grit of the beach raked against my cheek and crunched in my mouth as I fell. With my head turned, I was aware of everything around me but couldn’t force myself to move. I was paralyzed.

  Kathrin stared at me, eyes wide, blood running in a heavy stream from her nose and mouth. I tried to speak but nothing seemed to be working—not my mouth, my arms, my legs…a prisoner in my own body.

  Behind me, an explosion buffeted the air and vibrated the sand beneath me like bass at a rock concert. It was mildly, bizarrely comforting, though, without my full senses, I didn’t even have the forethought to panic.

  Where am I?

  Without willing it, I climbed to my feet and ran back to the house on the beach. I ran toward her—that bitch with the ponytail and the body armor.

  Wait. Why do I think she’s a bitch? Who is she?

  I wanted to kill her but I didn’t know why. She had done something that sent me into a rage, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what. I tackled her, sending her to the ground, but she was so strong—so impossibly strong. She flipped me onto my back and climbed on top.

  Even then, I didn’t panic, though I felt I should for some reason. Oddly, I didn’t try to break her hands away from my throat when she grabbed it. That’s when I started to get a little nervous.

  I’m choking! Get her hands! Though I’m not sure who I was saying it to, or even how I was saying it. No noise came from my mouth.

  I felt the hot blood backup in my face and head. My ears rang with that familiar high-pitched tone I had suffered since…since…I don’t remember when it started.

  Again, without willing it, I reached up and yanked the knife from its sheath on her tactical vest.

  Yes! That’s it. Stab her, I said or thought…it’s so confusing. Cut that bitch’s heart out!

  My arms felt weak, not up to the task. Instead, inexplicably, my mind flooded with stats and diagrams of internal organs. Immunodeficiency data and RNA interference histories cascaded over my vision like a transparency. I watched helplessly as the visual hallucination produced stream after stream of data, superimposed over the sight of the woman choking me, her face gashed and burned.

  Do something! She’s strangling me!

  She said something, but I couldn’t hear what. Abruptly, the hallucination stopped spinning past my eyes and zoomed in on a wireframe mesh of the liver and spine. My hand jumped, plunging the blade under her body armor, and then twisted—no, not twisted, flicked across the superimposed image of liver and spine.

  Her eyes narrowed, seemingly unfazed otherwise by the blade. But then her arms went limp.

  “You will unfortunately not be retiring your primary target,” I said, though I don’t remember why or even trying to say it.

  I pushed her to the side and suddenly remembered why I was angry at her—she had hurt Kathrin.

  “Kathrin!”

  A hand on my chest woke me. “You’re having a nightmare,” she whispered.

  I sat up drenched in sweat and gasping for air.

  “Same one,” I said between breaths. “It’s so real.”

  She laid her arm across my chest and urged me down, placing her lips on my ear as I fell back. “It’s a dream,” she whispered. “I’m here with you…feel me.”

  I nodded as the tension in my chest began to subside. “I know. It’s just so…”

  “You’re here just like we planned. You know where… Say it.”

  I strained to remember the name of the town in Germany where we lived. The town we had moved to years ago. “It’s… it’s…”

  She breathed out in a long sigh, smiling. “Upfingen… we live in Upfingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.”

  “Right. I know that. We live in Upfingen.”

  She nodded and patted my chest. “It was only a dream.”

  “I know…it’s just so real.”

  She kissed my lips, just a peck, then came back for a more passionate kiss. She slowly, carefully climbed on top of me. Her hands trailed up my sides, then to my head, holding my face between them. “I love you, my beautiful man.”

  I smiled and sank into the warmth of her touch, finally getting my breathing under control. “I love you too, sweet girl.”

  **

  3:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 24th—Falling Water, Wes
t Virginia

  WOLF had one job to do; manipulate everyone into position to execute the only plan that could save them all. Doing that as the occupying personality of an unwilling host—or more correctly, an unknowing host—made that prospect exponentially more difficult.

  He sat at the workbench with a soldering gun hovering motionless above the circuit board. With his eyes closed, he willed mental resources to Scott’s farm fantasy to calm him, distracting him from memories of the beach two months earlier. Once Scott’s mind had drifted away from anxiety, Wolf pushed him into a warm, dark blanket of sleep, wrapped in a coma of comfort and denial.

  It would do no one any good if Scott were awake—Scott would suffocate, having no ability to breathe or even maintain his heartbeat without his personality fracture, Wolf, to do it for him. His rogue CIA and SEAL teammates would flounder, helpless to devise any exit strategy without the vast information in Wolf’s head—Scott’s head. And worse, Combine would win. A handful of American and European billionaires would successfully buy, cheat, steal, and murder their perfect governments into place, sculpting the free world in the manner that most benefited them.

  Once Scott’s thoughts had faded into darkness, Wolf resumed his work and picked up a remote receiver, soldering it to the circuit board. In a matter of hours, it would be in the hands of Petty Officer Hawkins; one of the SEALs who had helped transport John Temple and Nick Horiatis into their rebellion.

  Petty Officer Egermayer would have been more suited for the duty than Hawkins; older, wiser, and more experienced. But Egermayer was dead; killed by Combine’s security forces in a sneak attack on Cayman Brac. As Egermayer slept in his watery grave somewhere off the northern coast of Jamaica, his SEAL teammates and the CIA renegades they answered to were in the heat of high treason.

  Of course, it wasn’t really treason. Caught off guard, maybe—possibly a little blind to the extent of Combine’s control of the government. But when the bad guys are in charge…okay, yeah, it was treason—they intended to overthrow the current Combine controlled leadership of the United States.

  Egermayer wasn’t the first combatant to die in the fight against Combine’s desire to rule, and he likely wouldn’t be the last. But Wolf didn’t get emotional about that sort of thing. Death, pain, fear; it was just data to him. Any emotions that contaminated his thoughts belonged solely to Scott and were nothing but a constant, annoying reminder of their odd relationship—a handicap to overcome.

  It had been 64 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes and 10…11…12 seconds since Wolf had commandeered Scott Wolfe’s otherwise disabled body. As he pressed soldering wire to the detonator receiver, he smiled at his improved processing abilities: That’s 92,515 minutes, he thought. Or 5,550,913…14…15 seconds. And it’s 17.60% of the year 2011.

  He stopped his work and looked up at the door after hearing movement outside. He couldn’t see who it was, but he knew it was Nick Horiatis. Nick had been a constant annoyance, frequently trying to sneak up on Wolf since Scott had taken the bullet to his head. Nick, like the others, found it disconcerting that Scott seemed perfectly fine even with an armor-piercing 10mm round in his brain.

  If Nick, or anyone else for that matter, knew that Wolf, and not Scott was the man in charge, it would change, even destroy, everything. Only one living person knew of Scott’s enhancement-triggered personality fracture, and no one knew that fracture was now in control of Scott’s life and body.

  Wolf returned his attention to the circuit board. “What, Nick?”

  “I used to have the best hearing in this outfit,” Nick said, stepping into the room.

  “Seventeen point six percent,” Wolf said before he could stop himself—the bullet in his head wasn’t as benign as he let on, and it continued to plague him despite the constant rerouting of pathways around Scott’s mangled and inflamed brain tissue.

  “What?” Nick asked, clearly confused by the odd response.

  “Nothing… What do you need?”

  Nick walked over and picked up an ohm meter from the bench. “I was wondering if you knew where Hawkins is… the LT hasn’t heard from him in a couple of days.”

  Wolf finished soldering the receiver and sat the iron on the bench before taking the ohm meter from Nick’s hands. “Yes,” he replied as he pressed the tips of the meter receptors to the circuit board. “I do know where he is. And I know what he’s doing.”

  “Is that a new talent you’ve picked up? Can you tell me what he’s thinking?”

  The circuit test was successful. Wolf sighed as he set the meter down next to the soldering iron. “Yeah. He’s thinking his life would be so much easier if the CIA officers on this Op would stop arguing among themselves.”

  Nick grinned. “I don’t argue.”

  “Yes, you do,” Wolf said, setting the device into a small metal box about the size of a lunch box.

  “No…I don’t.”

  Wolf looked up and smiled as he closed the lid. “Okay. You don’t.”

  He tucked the portable EMP device in a small backpack and walked past Nick, turning the light off in the makeshift workshop.

  He was halfway to the kitchen when Nick caught up. “Where is he, Scott?”

  Wolf sat at the kitchen table and took the top off the sugar bowl. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked, dipping the spoon in the bowl and shoving a heaping scoop of sugar in his mouth.

  “I can’t sleep knowing there’s a plan in the works I’m not a part of.” He watched as Wolf scooped another spoonful in his mouth. “Hey. I thought sugar was the devil.”

  Wolf chewed then swallowed. “Glucose.”

  Nick glared at him as he dipped the spoon in again.

  “…for cell growth.”

  Nick squinted in confusion.

  Wolf smiled. “Specifically, brain cell growth.”

  Just then, Petty Officer Whalen—Doc—walked into the kitchen, dramatically placing his hands on the kitchen table between Nick and Wolf.

  Wolf looked up at Whalen and smiled. “What’s up, Doc?”

  Whalen rolled his eyes. “You know, some of us have watch duty and like to sleep between shifts.”

  Nick looked at Whalen with a scowl but nodded. “Sorry.”

  Whalen didn’t leave. Instead, he pulled out the chair between the two and sat at the table. “As long as I’m up…” He turned and looked first at Nick, then seemed to change his mind and turned to Wolf. “John skipped his last five physical therapy sessions… I’m worried he’s given up.”

  John Temple, head of the CIA group that had been investigating Combine, had barely escaped Langley alive. Had it not been for Nick’s quick thinking, pulling a hardened filing cabinet safe over on them, the blast would have killed them both—it almost had anyway.

  “How much time do his exercises take?”

  Whalen draped his arm across the back of the chair. “No more than an hour each day. He could probably get away with thirty minutes, even, but he’s sat in that damned room for almost a week now.”

  Nick leaned forward, elbows on the table. “How long can he go without them?”

  Whalen shrugged. “Who knows? He could have clots behind his knees right now, waiting to sheer off and float to his brain.”

  Nick shook his head. “Shit.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Wolf said, rising from his chair.

  Nick grabbed his arm. “You better let me do it. He won’t like hearing anything from you right now.”

  “Trust me…it’s better if I do it.” Wolf shrugged Nick’s hand away and walked down the long hallway to John’s room.

  Only John and the SEALs slept on the first floor—the SEALs because of tactical practicality, and John due to his wheelchair.

  Wolf could hear Whalen and Nick creeping up behind him as he opened John’s door without knocking. He went into the pitch-black room and closed it.

  “Who’s that?!” John snapped, startled awake.

  Wolf found and sat in John’s wheelchair next to his bed. “It’s just me.”r />
  John fumbled for the switch on his bedside light and finally managed to turn it on. “What the hell do you want at—” he picked up his watch from the nightstand and tried to focus his eyes on it. “Shit! O’three-thirty? What the fuck, Scott?”

  “I was getting ready to go for a run and Doc mentioned you haven’t been doing your PT.”

  “And it couldn’t wait till morning?!”

  “I was up, and I knew you wouldn’t be busy, so…”

  John shook his head and took a deep breath, trying to put his agitation in check. “So, you’re going to lecture me now on how I need to keep my strength up?”

  Wolf shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. You’re a smart guy… You’ve been running your own life for a long time now.”

  “What then? You want to read me a bedtime story?”

  “I know how hard this has been,” Wolf said, lowering his voice and leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It was bad enough when you lost use of your legs. To lose the Agency, the old man, the analysts, your freedom…I can’t imagine how hard it must be for you.”

  John looked at him, his brow creased with suspicion. “Playing therapist?”

  “No, John. I’m trying to say I understand.”

  “Thanks, can I go back to sleep now?”

  “Sure.” Wolf stood and took the Glock from his waistband holster. He set it on the table next to John before turning to the door.

  “What’s that for?” John asked.

  “It’s your way out. No one will think less of you. We all know how hard it’s been.”

  John stared at the weapon for a second, confusion and anger rippling across his face. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you…if I made your takeover of this party that easy.”

  “No, John…I’m just thinking about you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Wolf shook his head, forced pity filling his eyes. “I know you John…or at least I used to. I know you hate being a burden, no tactical use to the mission.”