Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3) Read online

  There was only one reason he had accepted this particular assignment: Janet Price. The last time he’d teamed with the deadly NSA agent, Jack’s actions had shocked her. He recalled seeing the distrust shining in Janet’s beautiful brown eyes, just before she’d turned her back and walked away from him in Miami. That memory had left a bad taste that he couldn’t seem to wash away. Three weeks on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean had failed to expunge it.

  Perhaps this time he could prove that he wasn’t a rampaging psychopath with a death wish. And if he could convince himself of the same thing, so much the better.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hawaiian Airlines carrier landed at Honolulu International Airport just before 11:30 A.M. after a surprisingly smooth thirty-minute flight. The last thing in the world Jack wanted was to hang out at the airport for the next eleven hours waiting for his flight to Los Angeles, so he took a taxi to the nearby Best Western Plaza Hotel. Twenty dollars to the skinny female clerk at the counter avoided a wait for the normal check-in time. Jack took the plastic key card, rode the elevator to the third floor, inserted the card in the key slot for room 310, and stepped inside.

  The room was nothing special. It had green carpeting with a vine pattern and a white king-sized bed with a mocha runner decoratively arranged over the foot, a dresser with a television, a small desk, and a chair. Jack dropped the duffel beside the dresser and walked to the window that had a view over the pool area. Except for one fat guy wearing a red Speedo as he sunbathed on a lounger, it was deserted. Definitely not the Ritz-Carlton, but adequate for his purpose.

  Jack pulled the curtains closed and kicked off his sandals. Tossing the pillows on the floor, he seated himself in the center of the bed, crossed his legs, and, as he’d done every day for the last several weeks, prepared for deep meditation. It was a tool he’d used to attain clarity for most of his adult life, but now that he was faced with the distinct possibility that he was losing his mind, meditation had acquired a whole new level of importance.

  The air filled his lungs in a slow inhalation and then stayed there as Jack allowed the oxygen to percolate into his bloodstream before exhaling. He continued the breathing routine that prepared him for the deep immersion that would soon follow. Because this meditation would be different from any Jack had previously performed, he intended to take his time.

  Since Calcutta, Jack’s sleep had been plagued by dreams that were more than dreams. They were exceptionally detailed memories; they just weren’t his memories. Over the last two years, he had become convinced that if he was going to regain the self-control that had previously defined him, he would have to take such drastic action that it might threaten his rather tenuous grip on sanity.

  Up until now, everything he’d tried had been focused on controlling his conscious self. Since that clearly hadn’t worked, he was left with an alternative he’d previously been unwilling to consider: he would attack the problem at the subconscious level. That decision had led Jack to his recent study of lucid dreaming, more specifically to an obscure authority on entering the lucid dream-state by using an advanced meditation technique.

  Though Jack had spent many hours mastering the various parts of the Abramson method, until today, a strange reluctance had kept him from making his first attempt at putting it all together. He’d made the decision to end his procrastination during the short flight from Kauai to Honolulu, and Jack didn’t need to struggle to understand why today was different.

  Clearing his thoughts, Jack centered, working through a progressive series of meditation techniques, drifting deeper and deeper. As he noticed himself step across the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, he shifted techniques one last time, acquiring a vision of himself as a mere pinpoint of light floating in a vast sea of darkness. With a thought, Jack released the strand that tethered him to that pinpoint so that he drifted farther and farther into the dark.

  When the dream came, it engulfed him with a suddenness that almost startled him awake, but he let the feeling wash through him without latching onto it. And thus it passed.

  Jack looked around, the sense of déjà vu so intense that he thought for a moment he must never have awakened in that Calcutta clinic, that everything since that night had been just one endless dream.

  A pea soup fog cloaked the street, trying its best to hide the worn paving stones beneath his feet. It was London, but this London had a distinct nineteenth-century feel, and not in a good way. A narrow alley to his left beckoned him and he didn’t fight the feeling. The fog wasn’t any thicker in the alley. The narrowness just made it feel that way.

  Jack didn’t look back, but he could feel the entrance to the alley dwindle behind him as he walked. To either side, an occasional door marred the walls that connected one building to the next, rusty hinges showing just how long it had been since anyone had opened them. It didn’t matter. Jack’s interest lay in the dark figure that suddenly blocked his path.

  As he approached, the cowled figure turned and stepped through one of the closed doors on Jack’s right, as if it had no more substance than smoke.

  For a moment Jack hesitated, as a rush of fear pushed him away from whatever lay beyond that threshold and back toward wakefulness. But he’d come too far to turn back now. Following in the footsteps of the cloaked figure, Jack stepped through the ethereal door.

  CHAPTER 8

  The mind worm felt the intrusion and came alert.

  During all of the centuries since it had discovered its peculiar affinity for humanity, it had been known by many names, among them Anchanchu. Humans tended to associate it with demons of their primitive religious beliefs, but the truth of its existence was something far more complicated. A multidimensional being without beginning or end, it was capable of observing multiple timelines, but until it had happened upon humans, the mind worm had never experienced physical sensation or emotion.

  Anchanchu’s discovery of its ability to link with a human mind had come about when its thoughts accidently touched that of a woman teetering at the transition from life to death. The stunning brilliance of her raw emotion and pain had shown Anchanchu just how boring the rest of its infinite existence had been, that one taste leaving the mind worm with an addiction that could not be sated.

  In the centuries that followed, Anchanchu learned much about its ability to form a parasitic bond with a human host. Anchanchu could only revive one who lingered on death’s doorway, not someone who was beyond natural recovery, and the host had to willingly accept its presence. After the bond, the host remained in control of his or her own being with a nature essentially unchanged.

  Anchanchu, on the other hand, got to experience the host’s sensations and emotions for the duration of the ride. The mind worm could exist in only one host at a time and, once accepted, remained linked to that host throughout its life. What its host felt excited Anchanchu, and some of that excitement fed back to its host. The overall effect was that its host still loved what he had always loved and hated what he had always hated, just much hotter.

  And because Anchanchu’s intuitions also bled over, its hosts found themselves drawn to situations that spiked their adrenaline. Because of that, few of them lived to a ripe old age.

  Anchanchu had learned that it had certain needs that couldn’t be fulfilled by bonding with some Siberian dirt farmer or his wife. Despite all its limitations, Anchanchu had a very clear sense of those humans who strode the life and death boundary, fully immersed in humanity’s greatest and most terrible events. It always chose a host from this group.

  Except for that near-death state where the bond was first accepted, Anchanchu had never managed to establish direct communication with any of its hosts.

  But Jack Gregory had just kicked his way through that barrier.

  CHAPTER 9

  Jack felt his passage through the dream door as if he had stepped through a curtain of cool mist. On the other side he halted,
completely unprepared for the scene that confronted him. Jack knew this place intimately. He’d been here many times and had grown to love Switzerland’s second largest city. But if not for the five-hundred-foot Jet d’Eau fountain shooting into the sky where Lake Geneva emptied into the Rhône, he wouldn’t have recognized it.

  Jack stood at lake’s edge, his back to the avenue Quai Gustave-Ador, looking past the fountain across the city’s burning skyline toward the mushroom cloud that climbed into the sky northwest of Geneva. All around him, rubble that had once been buildings burned. Amongst the bodies that lay scattered about, a few survivors stumbled through swirling radioactive fallout raining from the blood-red sky.

  Suddenly a new wind thundered out of the southeast, racing back toward the mushroom cloud, flattening the buildings that remained standing and pushing the lake back into the city, destroying the fountain pumps that had miraculously survived the initial blast.

  Jack understood what was happening. The initial blast wave had propagated outward from ground zero. Now that same air had come rushing back to deliver another devastating blow to the city by the lake.

  Unlike the dreams with which he had become so familiar, this one wasn’t another person’s memory. This horror hadn’t yet happened. Yet? Why had he thought that? No matter how real this seemed, it was just a nightmarish product of his lucid dream-state. Jack had seen enough.

  He looked around, trying to catch sight of the figure he’d followed through the doorway to get here. It was gone. Jack didn’t understand how he could be sure of that amidst all the raging destruction that had reduced visibility to near zero, but he was. He’d been intentionally left here.

  Jack moved along the avenue, untouched by the wind-driven fire or the blowing debris that had once been Geneva, wondering why this imagery had gotten into his head. He might dream of nuclear war, but in Switzerland? Even more confusing, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been intended to witness this event, that he was somehow connected to it.

  Bullshit, Jack. Wake your ass up.

  It was then that a new thought hit him. He didn’t know how to wake up. Jack knew that he wasn’t really sleeping, so he should be able to consciously withdraw from the meditation. The problem was, he couldn’t sense his body. It was as if he’d completely lost his way. Just knowing he had a body sitting atop a king-size bed in a Honolulu hotel wasn’t helping him snap back to it. And there damn sure wasn’t any sign of the door he’d walked through to get into this deeper dream-state.

  Searching, Jack turned southwest into a maze of collapsed multistory buildings that the fires hadn’t yet made their way into. On the ground to his right, something drew his eye to a pile of bricks. From beneath a fallen wall, two hands extended, fingers tightly intertwined, one hand larger, one very small. Jack knelt to examine them, a growing sickness leaching into his soul. Mother and child.

  Jack reached out to touch them, but failed; he wasn’t physically there, just a subconscious idea of himself observing the chaos.

  Anger flared in his gut, and as Jack stared down at those entwined fingers, he fanned its embers into a white-hot rage that dimmed the world around him. Suddenly he felt his hands clench into such tight fists that his knuckles cracked. Jack opened his eyes and found himself sitting in a lotus position atop the bed, his sweat-soaked body rigid and shaking.

  Crawling out of bed, Jack staggered to the bathroom sink, turned on the cold water, and scooped it onto his face with both hands. When he lifted his gaze to the mirror, he noticed the familiar red glint that crept into his eyes whenever his blood was up.

  Staring at that reflection, Jack said what he was thinking.

  “Now that went well.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Steve Grange passed through the final layer of security and entered his ten-thousand-square-foot basement laboratory clad in scrubs. Without speaking to the woman seated behind it, he walked past the reception desk and entered the long corridor beyond. Three doors stood closed along the left wall, but today he had no interest in the work going on in the hardware fabrication laboratory that lay behind them.

  Instead he turned into the short hallway to his right, where he was met by Dr. Kyle Landon, his perpetually worry-lined face looking unusually hound-doggish this morning. Grange understood that look. Although the FBI was busy chasing one of the red herrings Chinese intelligence had prepared to mask the trail that led to Jamal Glover, the NSA had begun making serious inroads that threatened Grange’s timeline. Despite Qiang Chu’s repeated assurances that he could handle the NSA, worry had begun to worm its way into Steve Grange’s soul.

  Stepping up to the waiting Dr. Landon, Grange made sure his voice carried none of that worry. “How’s our subject’s recovery progressing?”

  Dr. Landon inclined his head just enough so that his eyes looked out over the shiny steel rims of his glasses. “There’s no evidence of fluid building up on the brain, but I’m worried about your plan to shave a day off the recovery schedule. The incisions need more time to heal before we move him to the other facility and hook up the electrode array.”

  “If I had more time, I’d give it to you, but we’ll be lucky if we don’t have to move him even earlier.”

  Dr. Landon’s frown deepened. “And if one of the incisions breaks open when he’s in the sensory deprivation tank?”

  “I don’t care if you have to put his head in a plastic bag and insert a breathing tube; I need the subject alive and functional for phase two.” Grange stared at Dr. Landon’s rail-thin face as the man’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows tried to knit themselves into one. “Don’t disappoint me, Doctor. Our Chinese friend has a very low failure tolerance.”

  At Grange’s mention of Qiang Chu, the color drained from Dr. Landon’s face. The doctor raised a hand to his lips and nervously cleared his throat. “I’ll make sure the subject is ready when you require him.”

  Grange grinned. “I like your attitude.”

  Dr. Landon pursed his lips, started to say something, but then turned and retreated back to the intensive care unit. Grange watched him go, confident that the brain surgeon would make good on his commitment. Despite the man’s perpetually sour face, he liked living.

  Unfortunately, Landon wasn’t the one who worried Steve Grange. His CGI development team had that honor. Turning left, Grange entered the second of two doors opposite the surgery room.

  The twenty-by-thirty-foot room that opened up before him housed three two-man workstations arranged in a loose triangle, facing outward. Narrow spaces between the workstations allowed access to the raised console that occupied the center of the triangle.

  It was an odd arrangement, but one that facilitated rapid communication among the developers and Delores Mendosa, the team leader. Grange saw Delores rise from her seat at the center console as she saw him approach.

  The woman stepped out through the gap separating the two nearest workstations to intercept Grange before he reached the developers. Delores, her jet-black hair styled into a short pixie cut, stood all of five foot three inches tall, but exuded a commanding presence that belied her stature. Like all six of her designers and developers, she had spent years creating incredibly detailed 3D virtual environments for video game companies and movie studios.

  Delores was smart and she was driven, two qualities that had earned her a reputation as a leader who could meet even the toughest deadlines. Known for her adamant refusal to be moved away from CGI development and into positions of corporate leadership, her people had dubbed her the Dungeon Master, or DM, a play on her initials that Delores readily embraced. It was her reputation that had brought Delores to the attention of Steve Grange. But it was the allure of the project Grange had offered that had ensnared her.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Grange?” she asked.

  “I want a word with you in private.”

  For a second her dark brown eyes regarded him. Then she nodde
d and led him through a door to Grange’s left and into her private office. Rather than going behind her desk, she motioned Grange to a seat at the small, round conference table before seating herself opposite him.

  Again Grange felt her fix him with her penetrating gaze.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “I may be forced to accelerate your schedule.”

  Her jaw muscles tightened. “I told you I would have the product ready for delivery on Thursday morning. There’s no slack in that schedule.”

  “There’s always slack.”

  “Not in my schedules.”

  “You may have to work your team through the night.”

  Delores hissed, a sound that seemed to bring a chill into the small room. When she leaned toward him, her eyes flashed with anger that she didn’t bother to hide.

  “Look, this isn’t some half-ass paint job we’re working on. My people are creative artists, experts at using graphic design tools to produce a digital environment that is indistinguishable from the one you’ve tasked us to simulate.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Ms. Mendosa.”

  “Good! Then you know that if I force my team to rush this, we’ll end up compromising on quality. If that happens, the subject won’t believe that his virtual companions and surroundings are real.”

  “Any sacrifice in quality is completely unacceptable.”

  “No shit!”

  Grange felt a scowl tighten his lips. The only reason he tolerated this woman was because she was irreplaceable. But unlike Dr. Landon, Delores Mendosa was absolutely fearless.

  Grange rose from the table to stare down at her. “I need the product to be ready by Wednesday morning. I don’t care how you do it; just get it done!”

  Without waiting for her response, Grange turned on his heel, walked out of her office, and then out of the CGI laboratory. Rounding the corner to his left, he heard the door snick closed behind him.