Hostage Run Page 4

  The smiling man leaned close to her, filling her vision with his deadly stare. “You’re useful to us alive for now,” he said. He had a hoarse, strangely high-pitched voice. “But we’ll kill you if we have to. Make a noise and we’ll kill you. Try to escape and we’ll kill you. Annoy us and we’ll kill you. Just keep quiet—keep still—and who knows? You might just stay alive. You get me?”

  Before Molly could even nod in answer, the narrow face was gone. The flashlight turned away from her. She lay where she was on the floor and watched as the shadows of the three men walked to the door.

  The tears were still flowing down Molly’s cheeks and when she called out, her voice was thick with crying. “Why are you doing this to me?” she said.

  They didn’t answer. They didn’t even turn back. They went out. The door shut behind them.

  Molly lay on the floor in the dark alone.

  Highway 313 and Cooper Road. 157.4 miles west, she thought, crying, gasping for breath.

  157 miles from home.

  5. MISSION CRITICAL

  A HELPLESS TERROR flooded Rick’s heart. He knew that something awful was about to happen to him. He felt it first as a tingle in his fingers. He looked down and his worst fears were confirmed: his hand was beginning to dissolve!

  First his fingertips went, then the stumps of his fingers, then his knuckles, then his palm. It was awful! His hand was pixilating in front of his eyes, the flesh transforming into foggy, colored squares, like a video going wonky when the Wi-Fi isn’t fast enough. He tried to call out for help, but his voice wouldn’t come and he realized with horror: he was dissolving on the inside, too, his lungs turning into pixels, and his stomach . . .

  A silent scream filled his mind . . .

  Then there was loud, rapid knocking on a door and he woke from the nightmare, breathless.

  He looked around, his pulse hammering. He was in his bedroom, in his bed. He saw the Orange Empire football poster through the morning shadows. The New England Patriots calendar . . .

  The knocking was coming from the bedroom door.

  “Yeah,” he said sleepily.

  The door came open and his father poked his head in.

  “Almost time for the briefing,” he said quietly. “Better get up if you want some breakfast.”

  When his father had withdrawn, Rick sat up on the bed. He pressed the heels of his palms against his brow. His head was throbbing. The headaches weren’t getting any better. And the nightmares—they were definitely getting worse. That last one—wow!—like a horror movie being shown inside his brain. His hand pixilating. His insides dissolving. Not good. Not good at all.

  He knew it was because of the MindWar. He had gone into the Realm too much on his first mission and he had stayed in there too long. His consciousness had started to come apart, just as Miss Ferris had warned him it would. She had told him: if you remain in the Realm more than an hour and a half or so, you will lose your mind and turn your RL self into a vegetable. He had nearly done just that, and the aftereffects were still with him.

  Over the last weeks, he’d convinced himself he was recovering, getting better. And in a lot of ways, that was true, he was. His broken legs were so much stronger now. His whole body was stronger. But the nightmares continued to haunt his sleep, and the headaches continued to dog his mornings. He hadn’t told anyone about them because he was afraid Commander Mars would take him off the project. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to get back into the Realm to rescue Mariel and Favian. But the nightmares and headaches weren’t going away, and it was beginning to worry him.

  He got up and washed up and limped down the hallway to the kitchen.

  The MindWar Project had installed the Dial family in a pleasant little green-and-white wooden house in a quiet corner of the forest compound. The apple and oak and maple trees that surrounded the place made for nice views from the windows: the branches obscured the barbed-wire fencing and guard towers that ringed the compound. Indoors, Rick’s mom had made the place as homey as possible. Family photos hung on the walls and the furniture was warm-looking and comfortable. And now there were Christmas decorations, too: fairy lights on the windowsills, a crèche on the lampstand, and a substantial pine tree standing untrimmed in the living room. Rick and his brother, Raider, and their dad had left the compound and gone out into the surrounding forest to cut the tree down themselves. And the five guards armed with automatic rifles who had gone with them on their outing had added just that necessary touch of Christmas spirit!

  Mom had taken special care fixing up the kitchen. The yellow tiling on the wall and the fake wood tiling on the floor, the orange curtains on the windows, the breakfast table in a nook beside the stove—it looked almost like their old kitchen back home. In fact, despite the rigors of living in a fenced-in compound surrounded by armed guards all the time, Mom herself was looking brighter and more cheerful than she had in months. And Raider—who’d turned nine years old a few weeks ago—well, he always looked bright and cheerful, but he looked even more cheerful now if that was possible. His round freckled face was flapping as he chewed his cereal, all the while chattering away in his high, excited voice. It seemed like nothing could depress the kid.

  It was all because Dad was back. That’s what made everything seem all right again, even here in the middle of the woods, surrounded by barbed wire and guns. There he was at the breakfast table again, absentmindedly paging through the Wall Street Journal, only half listening to Raider’s chatter, letting his coffee get cold, forgetting even to eat his eggs unless Mom reminded him. It made their home seem almost normal.

  Having everyone back together again, having everyone act so loving and cheerful, Rick wanted to feel nothing but happiness. But his emotions . . . they were complicated. It was great that his dad hadn’t really deserted the family for good, but it still rankled Rick that he had left at all. Worse, he had pretended he had run off with an old girlfriend, Leila Kent. He had let them believe that about him for months, leaving Rick bitter and angry that whole time. Rick knew his father was trying to protect them, trying to do the work he needed to do to end Kurodar’s MindWar against the U.S. But was it right to sacrifice his family’s happiness—even for a little while—just to go off on some secret mission? It still made Rick angry when he thought about it, and he thought about it a lot. He didn’t want to be angry with his father anymore, but he was.

  Still, for now, he tried to join in with the general good cheer. Despite the throbbing in his head, he gave them all a hearty “Good morning, team!” as he scored a mug of coffee from the machine on the counter. He dealt his brother a friendly head noogie as he sat down at the table. And for the next fifteen minutes, he dutifully shoveled cereal into his face, listened to Raider yammer, and even made a couple of jokes and laughed with the others.

  It was only when he and Dad got ready to go that the mood shifted. Then Mom stood in the foyer watching with a forced smile as they went to the door. Her eyes, Rick saw, were full of fear, and her hand rested protectively on Raider’s shoulder. Raider pressed his lips together in a show of determination and pumped his fist at his big brother by way of encouragement. But even the Happy Face Kid looked pretty fearful himself.

  Outside, in the clear, crisp, cold morning, Rick and his father walked across the compound together. Rick was still limping a little on his aching legs, but he was much bigger than his father, his strides much longer, and he managed to keep up. Yet, even though they moved along shoulder to shoulder, they were silent. With all the unspoken feelings between them, they’d had a hard time making conversation with each other these last couple of months. They went past the compound’s barracks and its main building, each lost in his own tense thoughts. Their footsteps, crackling on the frosted earth, were the only noise they made.

  They came to a nondescript bungalow at the compound’s center. It was little more than a shed of wooden boards and glass. An armed guard was posted at the door. He nodded to the elder Dial as they entered. Another armed gu
ard waited inside. He watched them, stone-faced, as they walked into the big elevator that took up maybe half the bungalow’s interior.

  “It’s weird,” murmured Rick as the elevator door closed and the box began to sink quickly. They were the first words he’d spoken to his dad since they’d left the house. “At home, everything seems so normal. The Christmas stuff and Raider chattering and Mom making breakfast . . . Then this.”

  His father nodded. “I have a feeling it’s all going to get a lot weirder before it’s over, too,” he said with a sigh.

  Back again in the underground amphitheater, Rick sat beside his father and Commander Mars. Miss Ferris (in yet another dark-colored pantsuit) stood on the platform before the holograph screen and raised a pointer toward the three-dimensional image of a factory building.

  “I’m sure you remember the explosion and fire at the fertilizer plant in southern Arkansas last month,” she said flatly. “Nine people were killed in the blast.”

  Rick sat up sharply as the 3-D factory exploded, sending a holographic fireball up toward the ceiling. It looked so real, he almost expected the flames to engulf Miss Ferris herself. Not that that would make her change her tone of voice or anything!

  “The explosion was officially ruled an accident caused by a friction spark that ignited some poorly secured chemicals. And that may in fact be what happened,” she went on. “But about forty-five minutes prior to the event, a Spartan combat drone disappeared from a nearby facility owned by General Aerodynamics, one of the country’s leading drone manufacturers. The Spartan is a miniature radio-controlled flying device, but it’s capable of carrying and firing powerful missiles along with other weapons.”

  The first billowing three-dimensional flames were subsiding into the scorched factory as Rick said, “Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying you think an American drone may have opened fire on an Arkansas fertilizer plant?”

  “I’m saying it’s possible,” said Miss Ferris.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No. It doesn’t. Unless the drone’s controls were taken over from an outside location.”

  Rick felt something like a cold wind go through him. Outside location. He knew what that meant. The MindWar Realm: the world created through the interface of computers and Kurodar’s imagination. In theory, it could allow him to simply think his way into any computer system in the world and take it over. That included the system that controlled a weaponized drone.

  “So you think this was some kind of test,” Rick said, thinking it through out loud. “Kurodar wanted to see if he could take control of our warrior drones. If he could, then he could use our own weapons to launch an air attack on the U.S. from inside the country. He could strike anywhere he wanted. He could massacre . . .”

  “No one knows how many,” said Miss Ferris without any emotion at all. Rick found himself wondering if maybe she was a drone herself.

  “But if it was a drone that attacked the warehouse,” Rick asked her, “wouldn’t there be, like, a computer trail? Pictures? Radar? Satellite images? Don’t we have that stuff covered?”

  “That’s exactly what worries us,” said Miss Ferris, gazing up at him with an expressionless face. “When I say the Spartan disappeared from the manufacturer, I mean it disappeared completely. No radar. No satellite images. Nothing. It was just suddenly gone—and forty-five minutes later . . .” She gestured at the burning building again.

  As if he not only took control of the drone, but somehow managed to blind security to the attack, Rick thought.

  “It shouldn’t be possible,” said Miss Ferris. “But apparently, it happened. And it may not be the only time.”

  Rick opened his mouth to echo her, “It may not . . .” But he fell silent as the ramifications occurred to him.

  “We think it’s possible—even probable—that other drones have gone missing from their storage facilities. A lot of other drones.”

  Rick let out a snort at the idea. “Well, don’t they have inventories?” he drawled sarcastically. “I mean, doesn’t the government or the factories or somebody keep count of exactly how many deadly drones we’ve got? Seeing that they’re, you know, deadly. I mean, if Kurodar stole enough untrackable drones with enough firepower, he could destroy an entire city! Shouldn’t our security systems be able to prevent that?”

  “You would think so,” said Miss Ferris without cracking a smile.

  Rick blinked—but before he could speak again, Miss Ferris turned back to the holograph screen and the images there changed.

  The burning factory faded away and in its place there appeared a weird, abstract, diagrammatic map. It was, Rick knew, a map of the Realm. The MindWar engineers had downloaded it from Rick’s brain while he was immersed in Kurodar’s online world. Rick recognized parts of it. He remembered the Scarlet Plain, the Blue Wood, the Sky Dome Fortress—or what was left of it after he had blown the place to the cyber version of kingdom come. And, in the distance, he saw the Golden City that was supposed to be the heart of the place, its power center.

  But between the areas he had already explored, and the city to which he had never been, there was a great black area with a huge silver ring placed in the center of it.

  “Because the MindWar Realm emanates directly from Kurodar’s imagination,” Miss Ferris said, “it’s impossible to diagram it accurately without an actual presence on-site.”

  Meaning me, Rick thought, eyeing the silver ring warily.

  “But once you’ve been through an area, you leave traces of your avatar consciousness and we can continue to monitor it for changes. We can’t be a hundred percent certain, but we think we’ve detected a new structural anomaly beyond the area where the Sky Dome Fortress used to stand. We believe this may be the new facility Kurodar has been testing, and it may have something to do with his ability to completely circumvent our defenses. Given the size and shape of it, we think it’s nearly complete and might be fully operational in as little as three days.”

  “Three days! You think . . . whatever that thing is—it’ll be able to take control of our warrior drones and use them against us—three days from now?”

  Miss Ferris faced him directly, her expression as blank as ever—although Rick imagined he saw something especially grim in her eyes. She had just opened her mouth to answer when an angry shout came from beyond the amphitheater door.

  “Forget it! That’s just not going to happen! ”

  Startled, Rick realized that while he had been wrapped up in Miss Ferris’s monotone lecture, his father and Commander Mars had quietly slipped out of the theater.

  Even more startled, he realized it was his father—his quiet, bookish, religious, absentminded-professor father—who was shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “Keep your voice down!” said Commander Mars in a harsh whisper. He gestured brusquely, trying to get the Traveler to move away from the amphitheater doors. Underneath that absentminded-professor routine, the man was as stubborn as a stone mule, Mars thought.

  The Traveler—Lawrence Dial—dutifully followed Mars a little ways down the hall. It was true: despite his mousey, professorial looks, he was a man with a good deal of inner fortitude. For instance: as flaming angry as he was, he’d already gotten his temper under control, never an easy thing to do. Now he managed to bring his voice down. He didn’t want Rick to hear them arguing. Within hours, his son would be returning to the Realm, and he was going to need all the confidence he could get. He didn’t need to know that the two leaders of the MindWar Project—the two men most responsible for keeping him safe during his immersion—pretty well despised each other.

  “It’s just not going to happen,” the Traveler repeated in a voice as low as he could manage. “I held off breaking the news to him to give you time to make a plan. But No Plan? That’s not going to cut it. We are not—repeat not—abandoning Molly to those killers.”

  “I said we would go and get her as soon as the mission is over.”

  As a devout Christian, t
here were certain words Lawrence Dial didn’t like to use out loud. But let’s face it: he was thinking them. This Mars, after all, was the man who had once pointed a pistol at his chest, completely ready to kill him to save his precious mission. Dial could not be surprised by Mars’s cold-blooded attitude now, but he sure wasn’t happy about it either.

  “That’s not good enough, Mars,” he said. “They could kill Molly by the time Rick gets back. They might well have killed her already.”

  “Well, that would be a shame,” said Mars coldly. “But it’s better that one young woman die than the entire country be destroyed.”

  The Traveler drew a long breath, trying to keep his temper in check. He knew that Mars disliked him intensely. He knew that Mars wanted to walk away right now. There was only one reason the commander was listening to him at all: the MindWar Project needed the Traveler in order to succeed. It was Lawrence Dial who had developed the system that injected Rick into the Realm. It was he who had developed the energy burst that had been programmed into Rick’s avatar so he could deliver it to Mariel and Favian and keep them alive a little while longer. And if anyone was going to create the sort of weapon they needed to win the MindWar once and for all, it would be him, the Traveler, Dial. Mars needed him, and so he would listen for a while. But Dial would have to stay calm if he was going to make his case.

  “Listen to me carefully,” the Traveler said, lifting a finger and leveling it at Mars’s face. “Molly is a fine young woman and the daughter of my best friend . . .”

  “Don’t make it personal,” Mars said.

  “It is personal. I’m not going—”

  “We don’t bargain with terrorists—” Mars interrupted.

  “I’m not talking about bargaining,” Lawrence Dial interrupted back.