Predator's Game Page 2

  Suddenly, Gannon fell forward, and a light cloud of white began to diffuse around his head. Tris, as well as the others in the room, stood gape mouthed, staring at the screen as a third target entered the scene.

  Dizziness engulfed Tris, forcing her to reach out and steady herself on the table.

  “Jagger,” Harbinger said across the radio. “Report status of target. Has he been acquired?”

  “I’m sorry, but Mr. Jagger isn’t available to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message at the tone,” came a new voice.

  “Fuuuuuuck,” Emrick muttered, still staring wide-eyed at the screen. “Please tell me that didn’t just happen.”

  Pressure rose to the back of Tris's neck and constricted, as if some invisible force were trying to pull her spine out of her body. She stumbled forward, unable to breathe.

  “No,” she whispered. There wasn’t air left in her to speak any louder—she could almost feel the genetic pair-bond tearing at her insides, driving her into a state of confused panic…followed by anger.

  “NO!” she screamed at the screen, her rage boiling beyond language’s ability to convey. The scream morphed into a raspy, guttural groan, sending Emrick and the technicians stepping away. When her lungs had no more air to expel, she breathed in, sucking angry tears that streamed down her cheeks.

  “Someone get her out of here,” Emrick said to no one in particular.

  As soon as a tech stepped toward her, she grabbed the closest movable object, her chair, before slinging it through the air at the large monitor at the front of the room. The satellite video stream continued behind the splintered glass, interrupted by black areas that could no longer produce an image, leaving a jagged, partial view.

  “Get her out of here,” Emrick yelled as the back door of the control room burst open and a pair of Jagger assets, both male, entered the room, firing at Tris. Both shots struck her neck near the carotid—Tranquilizers, Tris realized.

  They didn’t wait to move in, instead circling rapidly around to each side before the drugs took effect.

  She looked at both of them as the haze of the drug tugged at her mind, as if a weight were pulling her beneath water. She screamed a ragged, wordless screech of anger.

  “Maintain,” one of them said as he moved in to grab her.

  Tris lashed out with her foot and struck his ribs. The Jagger pinned her leg under his arm, ignoring the pain, as his partner closed in from the other side, shoving Tris’s shoulders down to the ground before striking her in the face. The combination of the drugs and the punch closed a curtain of darkness around her.

  She awoke later in the dark, lying flat of her back on the floor in her “dorm” room—previously shared with her genetically paired partner, Gannon.

  “Gan,” she whispered through the ache in her throat, her head heavy and throbbing before remembering why her throat was sore—she had been tranquilized. Her neck throbbed where the twin puncture wounds swelled beneath her chin.

  As soon as she remembered why Gannon wasn’t there—realizing he would never be again—the tears began to stream. She lay on the floor, silently letting the flow run down the side of her face and neck before puddling on the cold tile beneath her. Her life, as well as her smug sense of invincibility, had been shattered. She would never feel whole again.

  Even lying flat on her back on the floor, she felt off-balance, as if even a slight shift would send her rolling to one side or the other. Panic rose in her chest as she forced herself to sit up.

  A sense of loss weighed on her as she began to convulse in sobs. Her shoulders turned in, protective, defensive.

  I am nothing now, she thought before anger surfaced again. It’s impossible! Nothing could have beaten you.

  A cold grip constricted her chest as the loss and anger battled within her for control.

  Nothing... “Nothing!”

  Anger boiled up through her, winning at least temporarily the struggle with her grief. Who was he fighting? It had to be an enhanced asset. No one could have beat Gannon in one on one combat—maybe another Jagger…maybe.

  And then a thought crossed her memory.

  Lance… Lance subjects tested faster than us, she remembered. Though she wasn’t privy to all the Lance program details, she had seen the reflex response rate data in the lab system after her last upgrade injections—they were scary fast.

  She pushed herself from the floor before padding silently to the door. She closed her eyes and listened…she would have heard a heartbeat outside of her door had there been one. After a moment of quiet, she walked softly away from the door before stepping up on Gannon’s bed. She felt a twinge of pain in her heart as if it were some dishonor to use it in that manner.

  The light on the in-room surveillance camera was out—not that it made any difference. They had learned long ago that the camera could be active without the light.

  Though the enhanced assets were volunteers—the Jaggers were, anyway—once in the program, they became the virtual property of the US government, their comings and goings tightly controlled and monitored.

  Even so, she pulled the close-fitting shirt over her head and wrapped it securely around the lens. Once satisfied it would block all light if active, she returned to the door and listened.

  Taking a deep, cleansing breath to chase away another wave of loss as it welled up inside her, she tested the door latch—Locked. They must not want me wandering tonight.

  Then another thought tugged at the back of her mind. What if I’m of no use to them now that Gan is…

  Her heart contracted in her chest as another wave of mourning welled up in her.

  No. Stop it. I have to find out what happened to him. I have to fix this…this imbalance.

  She set to work, pulling a thin strip of plastic off the corner of her box-spring before returning to the door and sliding it into the gap between the frame. After a few seconds, the latch clicked quietly and she paused again to listen.

  The corridor was dark when she emerged from her room like a shadow. She moved, barefoot, down the hallway to the stairwell at the end of the barracks. After pausing to listen once more, she climbed the stairwell to the top floor, but rather than enter the corridor to the rooms above, she climbed up the metal ladder to the hatch for roof access. There, she stepped onto the gravel-covered roof, the small round pebbles catching between her toes as she moved toward the edge.

  Clad in only workout tights and a sports bra, the chilling late winter air forced a shiver up her spine before she could adjust her respiration rate to raise her temperature. She looked out over the isolated high-security compound, located on the fringe of Fort Detrick. There was no movement in the early morning dark.

  This was an excursion she had taken several times with Gannon. They occasionally escaped their room and ventured out into the compound, sometimes even going out onto the base to stretch their legs when they felt too cramped in their quarters. This would be the first time she had done it on her own.

  Shaking off another rise of grief, she rolled herself over the edge of the roof wall and reached down with her toes, feeling for the concrete lip above each window. Once her feet found it, she let herself drop, knowing precisely when to grasp the lip with her fingers and the sill with her feet. The window she was in front of was for the latrine—it was unlikely anyone was in there at that precise moment, but rather than linger, she immediately let herself drop the greater distance to the window one floor down.

  Like a cat, her feet and fingers found their mark simultaneously. With her momentum up, she dropped to the ground, crouching to listen before continuing.

  She glided across the compound with no more impression than a soft breeze. Had anyone been present to witness her departure, it would be unlikely they would have experienced anything more than a shiver up their spine as she slid past them in silence. But there was no one present—the perimeter fence and sensors were far too sensitive to concern anyone inside. A large moth would set off the perimeter detection if it flew too close—made so to keep prying eyes out and wandering assets in.

  But Tris wasn’t interested in breaching the perimeter this morning—she was headed for the lab building.

  Staying low, she peered around the corner of the armory for just a split second. Enough time to see two plainclothes DIA internal security men walking toward her. Grabbing the cornerstone of the brick building with her fingers and toes, she quickly climbed twelve feet off the ground. She waited until the men had rounded the corner and passed beneath her before sliding quietly around to the side they had just passed. She could feel their body heat rise and caress the bottoms of her bare feet, and when she looked to see if the move had gone unnoticed, she couldn’t help but smile coolly when one of them shivered.

  Her reflex was to look behind her and get an approving nod from Gannon. A wave of grief swelled up like a panic attack, just for a second, before she dropped back to the cold ground.

  The alarm count is thirty seconds, she thought to herself as she arrived at the lab building. Forty-five second security response time. That gives me little less than a minute and a half to get into the vault from the time I break through the door.

  Confident she could satisfy her timing limitations, and reassured by a combination of training and instinct, she grabbed an edging stone from the border next to the entrance before smashing the lower pane of glass in the door. She didn’t wait to see if the noise had been heard. Ducking through the opening, she ran, still carrying the stone, oblivious to the cuts the broken glass was inflicting on the soles of her feet.

  Five, six, seven, she counted silently as she sprinted.

  She arrived at the deployment lab, the location of the viruses used to create the DIA’s secret soldiers. Twenty-one, twenty-two…

&n
bsp; She hefted the paving stone and smashed the key pad box from the wall. Thirty, thirty-one.

  The air was pierced by a shrill whistle as she stripped the wires from the dangling keypad and began pulling the plastic insulation off each wire in turn with her teeth. One by one she touched the tiny cluster of wires to one another, ignoring the alarm.

  Fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight.

  Down the hallway, she heard heavy boot steps running toward her as she continued to hotwire the door. Sixty-four, sixty-five. The door slid open.

  Hurrying inside, she grabbed the tied wires and yanked them, sending the door sliding closed. Once in, she looked up through the window as she opened the drawer on the metal desk by the door. The armed response team rounded the corner, rifles up, as they approached the lab. She yanked a metal divider from inside the drawer and shoved the edge into the electrical plate on the opposite side of the key pad she had smashed. With a sharp twist, the cover popped off.

  “On the ground,” one of the responders yelled at her. “Get down, now!”

  She reached into the hole and yanked the wires out, ripping the cluster out of the wall—they wouldn’t be able to hotwire it as she had.

  The security team opened fire. Gunfire cracked and flashed, splintering and clouding the Lexan window, but it held firm against the assault.

  Tris didn’t even blink as the onslaught continued. She calmly sat down at a computer terminal and began pulling up the DNA profiles from the Lance program.

  “Hold your fire,” one of the men outside said.

  Tris flashed her eyes up at the door to measure their progress as she opened the file on her own Jagger DNA profile. Someone was kneeling by the door lock, poking around where the wires would have been had she not yanked them out. She smiled as she began overlaying DNA markers on her own file.

  She was aware that to be a Lance participant, a subject had to go through a painful genetic normalization process, called Lance Optimization Transgenic Conditioning, or LOT for short. The LOT treatments were tailored to individual DNA by the manufacturer, and only those who survived the conditioning—a tiny percentage of subjects—would then receive the Lance enhancement virus.

  There was usually a several-week waiting period after the LOT injections before Lance would be administered—Tris didn’t have that kind of time, and she didn’t have the tailored LOT regimen. She would have to risk undergoing treatment meant for another subject, followed immediately by the Lance virus. The best she could hope for was finding a LOT subject’s DNA map that had some of the same primary gene markers that she did. Otherwise, it would be guaranteed suicide; it might be anyway.

  “Tris,” Emrick called calmly through the door as she continued to search the DNA profiles. “Stop what you are doing and come out.”

  She ignored him as profile after profile slipped across the screen, showing one DNA rejection after another.

  “Tris, goddamn it!” Emrick yelled after a moment.

  She heard the pop of a plasma torch at the door, accompanied by the flashing white light of sparks cast on the faces outside the window. Tris looked behind her toward the isolation vault. Its six-inch Lexan walls would be her fallback position—where she would spend as much time as it took for her to die, be executed or, if by some miracle it worked, be reborn. But she couldn’t go in there until she found her DNA match. Time was running out.

  On the other side of the lab glass, two other Jaggers paced back and forth behind the crowd, no doubt anxious to enter and put down one of their own. Honor among Jaggers only extended to the pair bonds, not to other Jaggers. In all other regards, they were simply coiled vipers, anxious to sink their fangs into anything they were released upon. They would flay her open without pause or regret as soon as the doors opened. She would do the same, if the tables had been turned, waiting for her next command—if she weren’t currently being driven by the near-compulsive desire to rebalance herself.

  The computer screen flashed yellow. LOT 23: 26.8% Key Gene match. Delivery not recommended.

  “Close enough,” she muttered before a new message popped up. Mandatory isolation containment for contagion incubation:14 days.

  She shook her head. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

  She got up and left the computer, walking toward the refrigerated storage room. In her peripheral vision, she saw one of the other Jaggers shadowing her on the other side of the long, windowed lab. She could feel his eyes boring into her.

  “Tris, what are you doing?” Emrick yelled.

  Tris picked up a rolling chair and smashed it through the window of the small refrigeration room.

  “Tris! What are you doing?!” Emrick yelled louder.

  Again ignoring the cuts on her feet, she walked through the opening and went straight to the Lance program rack. She punched the glass and reached into the refrigerator, extracting a vial for the Lance enhancement and the LOT 23 precondition gene therapy.

  “Open fire,” Emrick ordered.

  Bullets began cracking against the Lexan again as Tris turned, unflinching, and walked back toward the main door. After taking two syringes from a cabinet, she pressed the door release on the small isolation cell that faced the main lab door. It slid open, waiting for its victim—the cell had seen far more deaths within its confines than it had successful enhancements. She, in all likelihood, would be dead before the lab doors opened again.

  The bullets continued to crack, splinter, and pit the outer windows. She knew it would only be seconds before the door opened and the other Jaggers would storm in. She stood in front of the door.

  “Cease fire!” Emrick yelled.

  She stared at him for several seconds. “For future reference, sending a solo Jagger into an Op makes him less than half as efficient than they were as a pair. You should have sent us both, if for no other reason than so we could die together.”

  “It was supposed to be a simple abduction!” Emrick yelled, angry and defensive. “We shouldn’t have needed both of you! I wasn’t told the target would be such a threat.”

  “Then the fault lies with you for not knowing more.”

  Tris reached for the emergency containment alarm button. Deployed, the lab would be locked down and six-inch, hermetically sealed walls would drop into place around the entire lab, including the isolation cell.

  “Jagger five! Rainer Echo Stampede. Stand down now!” Emrick yelled through the glass.

  Tris paused, her hand hovering just an inch from the oversized red button by the door, caught by the trigger words of her emotional conditioning as if she were a robot whose power had been cut mid-move. She listened to the cracking of the plasma torch as it sizzled through the door.

  She glared at Emrick. “Do me a favor and see if this works before you kill me.” She smacked the button before spinning around and running to the back of the lab as the walls began sliding into place. She dropped and slid the last few feet into the cell before the six-inch thick steel-framed Lexan smashed down.

  Inside she no longer heard the torch popping outside the door. Emrick was yelling at her, but she could no longer hear him either.

  She pulled the cover off the first syringe with her teeth before pushing the needle into the LOT 23 vial. After filling it, she flicked the air bubbles to the top and squeezed out a small portion.

  The intercom in her cell cracked to life. “If you wanted to kill yourself, you didn’t have to trash the lab to do it,” Emrick said, an annoyed amusement tingeing his tone. “It’s not going to work.”

  “There’s very little I can do about that now.” She replied without looking up as she sank the needle into the vein in her arm. “No door release from in here.”

  “You are going to die in there, and it will be two weeks before we’ll be able to recover your stinking corpse.”

  “If I survive, I’ll be the strongest weapon you’ve ever produced.”

  “If the virus doesn’t kill you, I’ll have to,” Emrick yelled—no amusement in his voice that time. “That’s not a DNA-matched treatment. It’s all wild card.”

  “It’s a twenty-seven percent match,” she said as her ears began to flush with heat almost immediately. “It’s better than nothing.”

  “Idiot!” Emrick yelled. “Don’t do the second injection.”