Chapter 22

Isaac waited with growing impatience as he sat in front of a large monitor mounted to the wall in the conference room. The heavily secured room was set up as a means for the Director to be in constant communication with Section 3’s committee members. The room itself was small, little more than a closet really. A lone, overstuffed chair, upholstered in a dark brown micro-suede material, sat in the middle with a keyboard affixed to a swinging armature in front of it. The walls were paneled in oak and the floor had a plush, navy carpet. Other than the screen in front of him, there was nothing else adorning the room.

He detested being kept waiting, and the Committee was certainly taking their time. He wanted their decision on what to do in regards to Subjects I and II and what they might be planning at Exclusive. He had to stop them before things got out of hand.

The black screen abruptly flickered to life and Isaac found General Armstrong’s gray eyes assessing him. The General was decked out in full military fatigues with his silver hair slightly matted to his head. The rough outline of where his cap had sat on it was still visible. He was in his office, the cap resting lightly atop a stack of papers to his left. Behind him was a beige wall with framed pictures of the man’s family hanging on it.

Armstrong narrowed his eyes at Isaac, and barely restrained anger could be found in every line and wrinkle on the man’s face.

“General,” Isaac said, as respectfully as he could manage.

“I’m growing impatient with you, Director.” There was no trace of frat boy humor in his voice now. He sounded deadly serious.but Isaac brushed it aside.

“What is the Committee’s decision?” Isaac asked, ready to leave the conversation and take steps to prevent what was about to happen himself if he didn’t get the answer he wanted.

“The Committee…,” he sneered, sarcastically. “That collection of fools and idiots listen to me and only me. The same goes for you.”

Isaac didn’t like where the conversation was headed.

“You are to let Subjects I and II proceed with whatever they are planning,” he said, his tone suggesting Isaac not even try to disobey the order. “I want you to set up enough surveillance equipment so we can assess their combat capabilities. A comprehensive assessment.”

“But, sir…,” Isaac started to protest.

“Those are your orders, Director,” General Armstrong said sternly.

“That decision is careless and, frankly, incredibly ignorant. If you take into account Subject II’s unique involvement with their mark...,” Isaac said heatedly, trying to convince the moron of how stupid it was to let the subjects proceed.

A sudden flash of irritated anger from the General, however, caused him to stop mid-sentence. Isaac had to visibly force himself to calm down. Anger wouldn’t solve his problem. In fact, it would most likely make things a whole lot worse.

The General shot him a smug look from his office.

“I see you’re beginning to understand consequences, Director,” he voiced, still using Isaac’s title to address him so he could make the conversation sound cold and formal. “I may have been outvoted to strip you of your position, but that does not mean you will blatantly disobey my orders or question them. You are quickly making yourself a nuisance to me, and I don’t like nuisances. You’ll either follow the orders I give you, or you can resign from your position. Which will it be?”

“If you’ll just listen to me,” Isaac responded, hoping to get the man to see reason. “It is unwise to let them proceed. They’re young and hot-headed. People are going to get hurt or killed.”

As soon as those words were out of his mouth, and he saw the General’s reaction to them, he knew he lost. Armstrong had no empathy. He didn’t give a damn about other people so he could care less if anyone got hurt or killed.

“You…will…obey…the…orders,” he replied slowly, enunciating each word. “You will instruct your agents to observe both subjects as they go up against Marks and his men. I want to see firsthand what kind of capabilities these two have in a combat environment. We paid a lot of money for them. I want to know if it was worth it. And just a bit of advice, Director, don’t try to do anything foolish. If you do, I will know, and I will make sure you regret interfering. I have my own sources inside Section 3, and they will be happy to provide me with all the information I need to bury you.”

Isaac started to reply, but the screen suddenly went black. The General cut the link from his side.

Anger at the man’s outrageous stupidity seethed inside Isaac. He slammed the swinging keyboard away, not caring when it was ripped off the chair and sent clattering into a wall. He felt impotent. He felt like his hands were tied, and that made him so furious he thought he might pop a blood vessel in his head.

He got up and left the room, heading back to his office. When he sat down in his own chair, he turned his computer on and watched his monitor slowly come to life. Its wallpaper was the first thing he saw, a generic screen of glowing lines and spirals of monochromatic blues on top of a black background.

He sat back in his seat for a few moments, trying to calm himself down. When he felt better, he moved closer to his desktop and searched the icons lined up in neat rows on the left of the screen. He double-clicked on a black square with a bright, neon red music note in the middle of it. A second later, his audio player opened up. He scanned through his list of audio files and picked one, then sat back in his chair and listened. The audio came from a wireless bug his agent (the one he trusted above all others) managed to plant inside the subjects’ room. No one else knew about it, and strictly speaking, it wasn’t exactly legal either. He went to great lengths to have it planted, hoping he could gain new information that would help him bring down the subjects.

The conversation he now listened to gave him exactly that. He’d already gone over the recording half a dozen times, but he wanted to hear it again.

“I get that, D, but you...”

“You don’t get anything, Alex. Until a drug-dealing piece of shit forces Cassie to be his pet whore you never will. I’m going to Exclusive and it’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m not waiting around anymore for them to do anything else to her. I’m going to go there and bring a living hell down on them. Then I’m gonna walk away with their money, destroy their operation as best I can, and free Anna.”

Isaac stopped it there, his face pensive and deep in thought. That part of their conversation alone bugged him a lot. It stuck in his mind like a thorn that kept digging and digging its way deeper into his brain. It unnerved him so thoroughly that it even sparked his insubordination with regards to General Armstrong. Revenge was a very attractive concept, promising to right the wrongs of life, but it never really put things right. In some ways, it only made things worse, creating a series of catastrophic events that would ultimately lead to one’s own ruin. Isaac had seen it happen just like that more times than he cared to admit.

He could hear the hatred burning in Subject II and knew given half the chance, he would use devastating force to free Anna Cook from Richard Williams. That, Isaac knew, had the potential to make the man spiral into deeper, more chaotic trouble. Section 3 and Dr. Tiberius had armed him with an arsenal of lethal abilities, and Isaac was pretty sure he would use them ruthlessly to get what he wanted.

He turned back to his computer, progressing the audio to the start of an entirely new conversation. It was there that he found his most crucial piece of information.

“No idea really. What if it’s because bullets are just too blunt? Think about it. Their tips are still pretty thick but the edge of a blade is thin. That might be why it was able to cut you. Here’s an example. One nail can pierce your skin if you lay on it right? But if you lay down on a bed of them, they won’t hurt you. Because there are more of them, they can evenly distribute your weight. Blunt objects are like many nails to us but blades are like a single nail. Does that make sense? It kinda makes sense to me.”

“Actually yeah. It kinda does,” Subject II said. “Good work. Anyway, regardless of how or why blades can hurt us, it’s still good to know our limitations before we take on Marks and his crew. We don’t want to go in there thinking nothing will hurt us when there’s something out there that can.”

There it was.

Thanks to his foresight, Isaac finally found the chink in the armor Dr. Tiberius gave them. Blades. The two indestructible men could be cut. They could be hurt. It was the only way he currently had of taking them down.

Isaac listened to the recording twice more, all the way through, committing it to his memory. Then he wiped it completely off his hard drive, taking special care to make sure any trace was gone. The feed from the wireless bug fed directly into his computer. It was against protocol but he knew if the General found out about it, Isaac would be facing worse problems than the unemployment line.

The General’s interest in the project never sat well with him. There was always something else lurking behind the man’s eyes. If he gained the knowledge of the subjects’ weakness, then there was no telling what he would do with it. Erasing the recording’s existence was also prompted by the somewhat disconcerting news of the General having his own sources within Section 3. If that were true, then no information was safe. Whoever was spying for the General would have no problems breaking into his office and his computer.

He glanced absentmindedly at his monitor for a minute more and then shut it down. He put away some files that were stacked on his desk, then got up, walked out of his office, and into a large room which was about as big as a tennis court. Gray-blue cubicles were sectioned off in groups of six, three to a side. Nine of these groupings could be seen throughout the room, each one separated from the others by three-foot wide aisles. Most were occupied by agents that were either talking on phones, filling out paperwork, or filing important documents. A few of them were empty which meant the agent that used it was either on assignment, out of commission for one reason or another, or had been killed in action. At the far end of the room was a single door made from a two-foot thick slab of pure steel. Other than the tunnel leading out through the motor pool, it was the only other thing that connected the highly confidential complex to the outside world. Section 3 was an underground facility, secretly built in the middle of nowhere. Security was the highest priority, as well as safety, of course. If experiments went out of control, they could be contained and taken care of without risk to civilians a lot easier than if it were above ground.

Isaac glanced around the central office some more, watching as agents bustled around the cubicles. He found one of the people he was searching for and caught her eye, motioning her over with a discreet nod. She started walking toward him immediately, making her way through the people around her. She had somewhat harsh, brutish features. Her black eyebrows were pulled down in a perpetual look of anger and cautious dark eyes flickered over her surroundings in quick, furtive bursts. The muscles of her bare arms rippled as she moved and she looked like a large predator cat slinking through the brush, stalking her prey in perfect silence. She was dressed in a skin-tight black tshirt with a grinning skull and crossbones on it, khaki cargo pants, and a pair of white and black skater shoes. A shoulder holster wrapped around her upper body, the pistol’s black grip jutting out from beneath her left armpit.

She stopped just slightly in front of Isaac, brushing a strand of glossy black hair out of her eyes. She kept her hair mostly short but her bangs were longer and traveled to just below her squared jaw.

“Sir?” she inquired, her eyes locked onto his.

“In my office,” he commanded.

She obeyed and immediately walked toward it, disappearing inside a few seconds later.

Isaac went back to looking around the office again, searching out his next target. This one was a jovial young man with blonde, somewhat shaggy, hair. He was joking with another agent until he was informed that Isaac was watching him. The laughter died away instantly and he turned around to look at the Director. He jumped up from his desk and started walking toward the boss. The man was good-looking, with brown eyes that always looked amused by something. A couple days worth of stubble shadowed his jaw and chin. His service pistol was stowed in a holster attached to the belt around his hips.

Both agents did not look anything like a government agent working for a secret, covert research department. But that was what Isaac wanted. He afforded all his agents the luxury of dressing casual because it gave them the ability to blend into crowds when needed. It was a lot less obvious than the Men in Black approach.

The man Isaac summoned stopped in front him, an inquisitive look on his face.

“In my office.” He repeated the same command.

The man nodded slightly and headed toward the office, Isaac following behind him. Once they were back in his office, he went to sit down in his chair. Both his agents took one of the two chairs in front of his desk.

He eyed them both.

“Agent Keevler.” Isaac said, looking at the female. “Agent Escher.” He said to the male.

“What’s up, Bossman?” Escher asked, his tone casual. Keevler rolled her eyes, disgusted at his blatant disrespect. Isaac, on the other hand, ignored it as he tended to do when talking with Agent Escher.

Isaac thought back to his conversation with General Armstrong. Before that conversation he had given them both orders to inform the local law enforcement of a potential robbery at Exclusive. Considering it was one of the wealthier clubs where a lot of prominent people visited, he was sure the threat would have been taken seriously. With any luck, the cops would have gotten there and their presence alone would have served to deter Subjects I and II from their course of action. Now, due to the General’s callous motivations, he was forced to change those plans.

“Orders have changed,” he said. “You are not to involve local law enforcement or to engage either subject under any circumstances. You are to let them continue on their current course of action.”

“But, Sir,” Keevler began, but she was cut off by a wave of Isaac’s hand.

“Those are your orders,” Isaac reiterated, his voice dispassionate.

“They’ll end up hurting someone.” Agent Escher’s face and eyes lost their perpetual humor, turning hard and serious instead.

“Those…,” Isaac paused to get his point across. “are your orders. Understood?”

“Understood, Sir,” they both replied, although grudgingly.

Isaac ignored their tone. Frankly, he didn’t care if they liked the orders or not, only that they followed them to the letter.

“Dismissed.” Isaac’s tone was flat.

Both agents rose and walked out, leaving him wrapped in his solitude once again. He cursed his fool of a boss for his arrogance, stupidity, and for his callous disregard of the potential for disaster. While that pompous idiot could sit hundreds of miles away in a luxurious office handing out orders that could get people killed, Isaac would be the one left to deal with the fallout.

After a moment of hesitation, he picked up his phone and dialed a cell number. It rang several times before a groggy, sleep-filled voice answered. He waited until the voice became more alert and aware before he handed a new set of instructions, ones that were completely at odds with those he had given Keevler and Escher. Ones that also went against the wishes of General Armstrong.

He put the phone back down and rubbed his face, suddenly very tired. It was late, but most of the time his job kept his mind busy enough for him to neglect sleep. That was catching up to him now. He sighed heavily. All he could do now was hope his other agent’s mission succeeded.