The Intelligence Director Read online

  He was cramped in there with Director Raze, three burly guards, and—surprisingly—Dr. Rio, with whom he’d never actually spent much time, or even seen around the compound. Dr. Rio was the other founder of Diotech. But normally it was Dr. Alixter who made visits to the ICC. Rio was known for keeping to himself and his research.

  Vas wasn’t sure why Rio had been sent in place of Alixter, but he had a feeling it had something to do with the nature of the breach. And something to do with Lyzender Luman. That much he had ascertained from the limited brief he’d received as they made their way from the building to the awaiting copter.

  “We will apprehend the two subjects using whatever means necessary,” Raze had ordered. “But the girl is the priority. You got that?”

  Vas had got it. But he still couldn’t figure out who this mysterious girl was. Another compound brat like Luman? Somehow he doubted that. Dr. Rio didn’t leave his research for just anybody.

  And never had any of Luman’s previous pranks sounded off a C9 alert.

  No, this was something else entirely.

  Raze interrupted Vas’s thoughts. “That must be them.” He pointed out the window at a small van that was speeding down the darkened two-lane highway.

  “How the hell did they get into a delivery van?” Rio spoke for the first time since the hovercopter ascended into the sky. “Someone had better get to the bottom of this mess.”

  “Don’t worry,” Raze assured him in that annoying syrupy voice that he reserved for the higher-ups. “We’ll figure it out. For now, let’s just get her back.”

  “She’s not to be harmed,” Rio warned.

  “She’s not to be harmed,” Raze repeated.

  Vas turned around and studied the three large muscular men whom Raze had brought with them. Death machines, Vas secretly called them. They were the operatives recruited only for their strength. Only for their fighting capacity. Only for their abilities to follow orders.

  Vas found himself wondering how Raze planned to keep his promise not to harm the girl when these three were involved in the operation. They certainly didn’t look like the kind of agents you brought along if you wanted to resolve things peacefully.

  “Vas,” Raze ordered, “patch us into the van’s auto-conductor system and override any previous directives. Bring them to a halt. But I want to be on the ground before they realize what’s happening. We can’t have them running. We’ll never catch her on foot.”

  Vas wanted to ask what he meant by that, but he held his tongue. This was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. His opportunity for advancement.

  Keep your head down. Don’t ask questions. Just do as you’re told.

  The hovercopter kept pace with the van, descending slowly as Vas sent the override command. It was a vehicle that made frequent deliveries to the compound, which made it easier to access its systems. Raze required all delivery vehicles coming in and out of the compound to have a mandatory override functionality installed, as a cautionary measure. Vas had always thought it was an excessive condition.

  He didn’t think that any longer.

  “Prepare yourselves,” Raze said.

  The override took hold. Vas entered the command to bring the vehicle to a halt. The van slowed to a stop just as the copter lowered gracefully to the ground.

  “Now!” Raze yelled, and they all leapt from the copter, running full-force toward the van. Raze took the lead, staying in front of the group. This was his operation. Although it wasn’t officially part of the brief, it was understood that he was to be the hero today.

  Rio stayed a safe distance behind all of them.

  “Door,” Raze whispered as they approached the stalled vehicle. Vas initiated the command.

  The door unsealed and slid open. Raze stood before the opening, his head rotating slightly as his eyes swept the interior.

  “Well, well,” he said, his voice playful but still packed with venom. “Going for a little joy ride, are we?”

  Then suddenly a body was upon him. Like an animal being let loose from its cage. Raze fell back onto the road with a grunt. The shadowy figure threw messy, unformed punches at his face, which Raze expertly dodged.

  “RUN!” the attacker shouted. And it was then that Vas recognized his voice.

  Lyzender Luman.

  But who was he commanding to run?

  The answer came a moment later when something emerged from the truck. It burst forth like a bolt of lightning. It certainly looked human, but it moved too fast. Faster than any human Vas had seen before.

  From the blur of brown hair that whipped behind its head, he presumed it was a girl. Most likely the “she” everyone kept referring to.

  He didn’t have time to process. The girl zoomed past him before he could even blink.

  He heard the muted plinking sound of a long-range mutation laser somewhere behind him and spun around. The girl had been hit. She froze mid-stride; her body wavered and started to melt. She staggered backward, then collapsed.

  The only thing Vas could think to do was put his arms out.

  And she fell right into them.

  He glanced down at what he had caught and felt like someone had stolen the breath right out of his lungs. For a moment, he almost wondered if she was an angel. There was nothing else in the world he could imagine that possessed such beauty.

  Her face was exquisite. Her skin the color of smooth honey. Her maple hair felt like silk draped across my arms.

  “No!” he heard a voice call. It was Lyzender. He had jumped up from atop Raze and was running straight toward Vas.

  Vas felt a sudden, uncontrollable urge to protect the girl. He scooped her up into his arms and began running back to the hovercopter. He passed the three other agents who formed a wall between him and Lyzender. He heard the teen boy barrel into them. It sounded like a body colliding with raw stone.

  “Get back here, you punk!” Raze’s voice cut through the dark night. Vas could hear the director struggling to his feet. “I swear I will end you. I will take every precious memory from your brain, every useful function. I will leave you nothing more than a glitching vegetable.”

  “Director Raze!” That was Rio. He sounded sterner than Vas had ever heard.

  Vas stopped and ventured a glance behind him, his eyes widening in shock when he witnessed the doctor physically restraining Raze. “Stand down, right now. That’s an order. I will handle the boy.”

  “Wipe him,” Raze yelled. “Wipe his puny, spastic brain!”

  “I said stand down, Director,” Rio roared. “Transport the girl back to the lab. I will take care of Lyzender.”

  Raze breathed deeply. It seemed to calm him. “Protocol?” he asked, his jaw rigid.

  “Full restoration,” Rio replied. “I don’t want her to remember any of this.”

  “No!” Lyzender screamed again, once more trying to push past the death machines. “Don’t you touch her!”

  This catapulted Vas back into action. He continued to run toward the hovercopter, the girl’s body still in his arms. He lowered her onto the seat. Her head lolled and her eyelashes fluttered. The effects of the laser were starting to wear off.

  She blinked and Vas saw her eyes for the first time.

  They were the most breathtaking, iridescent shade of purple.

  Director Raze knew this was far from over.

  Even after they’d managed to return the girl to her lab and successfully wipe the incident from her mind, he still had the matter of the breach to deal with. Which was why he wasn’t surprised to find Dr. Alixter back in his office the very next morning.

  He took a seat in the chair opposite Raze and crossed his legs casually. As though he were just there to talk about the weather. “I want to know how this happened.” His voice was calm. Eerily calm. Raze almost preferred it when he was angry and yelling through his teeth.

  Raze nodded, indicating the cluttered desk screen, as if the mess of reports and briefs were enough evidence to assuage Alixter, which he knew it
wasn’t. “I’m working on it.”

  “Clearly not hard enough,” Alixter argued. “Otherwise, this mystery would have been solved.”

  The truth was, the mystery had been solved. Raze had figured it out late last night. That glitching Lyzender Luman had distracted his guards with a vapor bomb in the Medical Sector. Then he and the girl had managed to board a delivery van leaving the compound.

  Fortunately for Raze, Lyzender didn’t know about her genetic implant. The one they’d used to pinpoint her location via satellite.

  But he wasn’t about to admit any of this to Alixter. Not until he could figure out a way to bury his own culpability. Because Raze knew none of this would have happened had he not shut his comms off yesterday. Had he not been in the lab assistant’s room.

  Raze stared through his office wall at the buzzing command center. A dozen agents running fool’s errands in an effort to make the place look busy. To make it look like all resources were being exploited to get to the bottom of this.

  His eyes landed on Vas. So far he hadn’t asked any questions about the girl, which was admirable. But he also knew he couldn’t allow the memory of last night to remain in the man’s mind. It was too risky. He’d already scheduled a memory modification session for later this afternoon.

  “Actually,” Raze said, still staring at his chief operative. He turned back toward Alixter. “We do have a lead.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows rose inquisitively.

  “I’d rather wait until I have a chance to follow up on it before I divulge any further information.”

  Raze half expected Alixter to fight this but, surprisingly, the president rose from his chair and said, “Very well.”

  And then he was gone.

  Raze waited until the doctor had left the building before swiping his finger along the panel on his bottom desk drawer. He pulled it open and surveyed the contents. He only had two injectors left. He was now wishing he hadn’t wasted the third on the stupid lab assistant.

  For more reasons than one.

  He pulled out the tiny device and pushed the drawer shut with his foot.

  Raze would be damned if he was going to let a glitching seventeen-year-old punk ruin his life.

  Hiding the injector in the palm of his hand, he accessed the intercom. “Vas?”

  “Yes,” came the fast, obedient reply.

  “Can you come in here, please?”

  He watched through the glass as the agent leapt to his feet and hurried toward Raze’s office door.

  Raze felt just the slightest hint of regret as the other man took a seat in his office. It was always a pity to lose a promising young operative. Vas had shown a lot of potential.

  But, just like the rest of Raze’s staff, he was expendable.

  As all subordinates should be.

  Vas had a hard time sitting still in the chair.

  This is it, he thought anxiously to himself. He had finally proven himself worthy. He had done an admirable job with the recovery operation and Raze had recognized his potential.

  That had to be what this was about. He could hear it in his superior’s voice. In the ten months Vas had worked here, Raze had never said “please.”

  Raze paced behind Vas’s chair, his hands clasped behind his back. “You demonstrated excellent aptitude last night, Agent.”

  Vas stared straight ahead, trying to fight back the smile that wanted so desperately to light up his face.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  He couldn’t wait to tell Jenniver. She would be ecstatic. She would leap into his arms and kiss his eyelids, the way she always did when she was excited about something. And, of course, the baby would only benefit from this promotion, too.

  “As you know, Diotech Headquarters has many secrets. Secrets that should never be revealed to the world.”

  “Of course, sir. I can be trusted.”

  “I know you can. But more than trust, I need people on my team who are willing to do what it takes to protect those secrets. And keep the integrity of this company alive.”

  Vas nodded sharply. “I understand. And I am more than willing to put the safety and integrity of this compound ahead of everything else.”

  He could almost hear Raze grin behind him. “I was hoping you would say that, Vas.”

  Then Vas felt something cold and metallic on the back of his neck, followed by a pinch of pressure. It was over so fast, he almost wondered if he’d imagined it.

  The room started to shift, the crispness of his vision slowly dulling. The edges of Raze’s desk and chair were softening. Like he was seeing the world through a soap bubble.

  His thoughts were distant and muddled, as though they had been locked in a dark closet in the back of his mind, and now all he could hear was their faint echoes.

  When Director Raze spoke next his voice had a melodic lilt to it. A song-like quality that Agent Vas found incredibly pleasant to listen to.

  “Stand up,” came the command.

  Vas didn’t even need to process it. He rose to his feet obediently.

  “Now listen very carefully,” Raze began, walking around to face Vas. He held his gaze tightly. “The girl escaped because of you. You cut the feeds. You facilitated the van’s exit. And you deactivated my comms so I wouldn’t find out until she was far enough away. You let her escape. Because you are in love with her.”

  Somewhere in that dark closet in the back of his mind, Vas’s own thoughts were rebelling, banging against the door, begging to be let out. They screamed about lies and corruption and manipulation. They shoved images of Jenniver and the baby and her brittle, warped bones at him.

  But he could barely hear those thoughts, let alone heed them.

  Not when Raze’s words seemed to make so much more sense.

  He felt his head fall into an obedient nod. Raze was right. He had let the girl escape. Because he did love her. How refreshing the truth felt to him. How freeing.

  “You will confess to Dr. Alixter,” came Raze’s next command. “You will admit to what you have done. You will tell him you acted alone. And you will suffer the consequences alone.”

  Yes, thought Vas. That is the right thing to do.

  All criminals should be brought to justice. And he was a criminal.

  “Do you understand what I’ve told you?” The director’s lilting voice massaged Vas’s brain, warmed his soul, made him feel alive.

  Made him feel important.

  “Yes, Director,” Vas responded blissfully. “I understand.”

  “The Intelligence Director” copyright © 2013 by Jessica Brody

  Art copyright © 2013 by Goñi Montes

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  The Intelligence Director

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  Jessica Brody, The Intelligence Director

 

 

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