Operation Chaos (3 page)

“Wait outside,” her kidnapper said. “We go when I say we go.”

These guys aren’t buddies, she thought. L.A.? They wanted to take her to L.A. why?

“It ain’t comin’ from me,
el capitan.
My job is done.”

“Get out. I’ll tell you when it’s time. And tell the pickup to hold tight. I’ve got my job to do.”

“L.A. gonna get shut down the riots get worse. Control wants us to go now. No time for talking.” A touch of acidic sarcasm in that voice.

“Get out. That’s an order.
No me jodas!”

Rainee spoke Spanish fairly well. She thought that meant something like,
Don’t fuck around with me.

The Mexican stared at him, then glanced at her with no shortage of hostility, before leaving, slamming the door.

Her kidnapper turned to her. “Doctor Hall . . . you aren’t in any danger, but you need to answer some important questions about your activities concerning your investigation into missing veterans.”

She stared at him. “Missing veterans?”

“Former patients of yours.”

“What is this about?”

“Former patients of yours. The ones who disappeared and you tried to find out where they went. You need to tell me about the investigations.”

“What’s L.A. have to do with it? He said—”

“We need you to come to L.A. to talk to somebody you know. He’s got some problems and needs help. We want to take him to a medical facility where you can help with that problem, and that problem is with men you once helped who need your help again.”

She studied him. This was not only the last thing she’d expected, it was touching on one of the greatest mysteries she’d ever dealt with.

He said, “You’ll understand it all in time. So the best thing is not to worry and just accept the situation. We need you to talk this guy down so we can get him the help he needs. You can help us with that.”

“How can I do that?” she asked.

“He’s . . .” he paused. He seemed conflicted. He went on, “he’s one of yours, Doc.”

“Yes, I think I assumed that.”

“Yes,” he said. “You did the major work on him. He’s become a rogue agent. A problem that we think was caused by a flaw”—another odd pause—“in the Z-chip set. He . . . he won’t come in or even talk to anyone else but you. And we can’t just grab him. He controls most of the underground of homeless vets in L.A., and that’s a small army. These Z-chip sets are the ones you originated.

Okay, Rainee thought, this is insane. But that he knew about the Z-chips, about her missing soldiers, meant this was very real. “Who is the soldier you want me to talk to?”

“You’ll find out later.”

“You know what happened to the missing vets who were in my program.”

“Yes. But later.”

I know you from somewhere, she thought, and I’m beginning to think that’s reciprocal. Something about her disturbed him beyond the madness of what was going on. It was an opening she needed to exploit.

Rainee said, “I’m obviously not in a position to be uncooperative. And I’ve been trying to find out what happened to my missing patients for over two years.”

He nodded. “I need to know one thing that’s very important. You hired a Detective Barnes to look for missing vets who were once in your DARPA program before it was shut down. That detective had an accident and died. I need to know who else you hired. Who else was involved in the search for what you called your MIAs—Missing In America—in that article they did about you in the
San Diego Union Trib?”

He waited. This big cat, this highly enhanced soldier, the kind she’s spent the best part of her career working on. She said, “The detective was the only one I hired. I just wanted to find out what happened to some of my patients. They started leaving the program and I never heard from them. It was just unusual. Fifteen of my long-term patients suddenly just vanished.”

He nodded, then asked, “You talked to no one else about them?”

“I talked to colleagues. Everyone involved in the programs was, obviously, upset. My patients were men with severe TBIs and when they just started to walk away from the program, it was very unusual.”

They stared at each other, studying one another’s expressions. I know him and, on some level, he knows me, she thought. But he wasn’t one of the disappeared from her program. He’d gone into other programs, not hers.

She said, “And it happened in such a short span. I checked all the homeless shelters catering largely to soldiers. I’m involved in various Stand Down projects here and L.A.. I hired the detective, but within a few weeks, he died in a tragic accident.”

“That was it?”

I know you, you sonofabitch. Who are you, where did I hear that voice?

She said, “I did try to hire another firm but for some reason they turned me down. I didn’t have the kind of funds to do much else. And the authorities were too overwhelmed with other problems to be of any help.”

Her kidnapper studied her in a cold way, as if he found her answer difficult to process. He said, “You can’t play games with me.” After a moment’s silence, he then said, “You can’t lie. I’m asking you a straightforward question and you need to answer truthfully.”

She said, “I am. I have no reason to lie.”

He said, “You tried to hire other detectives.”

“Like I said, unsuccessfully.”

“Your colleagues make any efforts?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do,” he said.

“My colleagues were concerned, but vets suffering TBI, PTSD come and go out of programs all the time. Some go into the underground, some commit suicide. It’s just that these were
my
guys. They had both physical and psychological therapies.”

“But you changed your approach after the hearings. It was less effective.”

She was getting a really uncomfortable idea of where this was going to go. What she was going to learn.

He said, “You were involved in many projects, with so many people in the top agencies and the military, you testified before Congress, and you have friends who are reporters. Were they involved in looking for the missing soldiers?”

What the hell is this? she wondered. That was history. How were those investigations, over two years ago, relevant to her missing soldiers? “I don’t know about what other people were or weren’t doing,” she said. “Yes, a lot of people were concerned, but in the world of TBI and PTSD, people vanish, come and go back to programs, sometimes we never hear from them. It’s the name of the game.”

“How far did others go with the search?”

Her interrogator was insistent, unemotional, and going by the playbook. A pro. It could be the early stages of something that could get nasty. She needed to head that off. She said, “When I lost a lot of people in a short time, it was just very unusual because my patients were badly damaged. They were mostly from elite units and they were more likely to follow the program. They needed the program and were determined to follow protocol. That’s why they were selected by the War Projects division of DARPA, and these soldiers knew that advanced brain prosthesis with chips to replace damaged parts of the brain was their only hope. I didn’t buy that they just abandoned their only hope and slipped off into the vet underground.”

“You’re sure? What about the hearings? Maybe that’s why they left.”

“No. They stayed with me through the hearings. They understood that the project was taken out of bounds by some of my colleagues who were working on an unauthorized metabolic-dominance program for military contractors. When that part was shut down, a few did leave. But most stayed.”

“Because of your success with AugCog.”

“Yes. Augmented cognition was my specialty and it was what everyone wanted.”

“Why did you turn against your own discovery? You testified against the most important military research project in the nation.”

Okay, she thought, now we’re getting somewhere. This is about metabolic dominance and AugCog and the congressional hearings.

“Yes,” Rainee said. “I helped build much of the project. But augmented cognition’s original purpose was taken way out of bounds of the guidelines we set up. It wasn’t supposed to be a metabolic-dominance program for creating advanced warfighters. That wasn’t its charter or purpose.”

“Maybe you just didn’t understand the reality,” he said. “Every program, like every technological advance in history, is about defense more than anything else. It’s about dominance and survival. All those programs by the Ergonomics Research Facility at SDSU were financed by the military and the research—”

“No. Not all. And I was unaware that unsupervised contractors were involved.” This soldier was more than she’d assumed. He was some kind of agent. The rabbit hole she’d fallen into began to look like the dark world of military research.

The investigations into that world had nearly ruined her career until she was cleared of any participation in illegal activities by a congressional subcommittee investigation, but the subcommittee really had no idea of what was really going on. They were utterly naïve. Or, more likely, they really didn’t want it shut down. They just wanted it out of sight.

Her kidnapper stared at her and she stared back, wondering for a moment if he was still with her or hearing something in his brain from far, far away.

Her world of military neuroscience had developed so fast, with so many off-book operations; it wasn’t even worth guessing where this was going.

The door opened. “Soldier boy, the pickup wants us to get to the drop point now.”

“Tell them to wait. Get out! Don’t come in again unless I call you.”

“That’s not going to cut it, dude,” the Mexican said. “L.A. is about ready to blow up. You need to get up there and do your thing before it does.”

“I’m not going to ask you again.”

The Mexican nodded, his eyes tight and hostile. He left, this time closing the door softly.

6

She said, “Does this former patient of mine in L.A. have a name?”

“You’ll know that when you need to. Right now, until we get to him, the less you know, the better. I will tell you that he thinks very highly of you, and if anyone can talk him in, find out what is going wrong, it’s you.”

“Bring him in to where?”

“You aren’t giving me what I need. I want the names of the people who are actually involved in your investigation.”

“I keep telling you—”

“And I keep asking for the truth. And it’s getting late. The pickup in L.A. must be today.”

“And then what?”

“We’ll take him to the Facility where you can find out what is going wrong.”

“Facility?”

“Yes. Everything you need to work is there. But we need to hurry and get this done. You can’t lie to me. I know when someone is lying.”

Now he’s the fucking Mentalist?

Rainee said, “I’m not holding anything from you. You asked me and I told you.” That was, on some levels, a lie, but her affect was as strong as she could make it. Then she asked, reversing questioner and questioned, a standard deflection: “What agency or project are you connected to?”

“You’ll know what you need to know when the time comes.”

In her world of hundreds of military contractors, some on the surface, and others in the dark, getting billions of dollars for research on projects nobody supervised because they existed under a tight, military, or intel veil of secrecy based on permanent wartime security, she now felt this man was connected to one of those projects. That it was connected to her people, and her research had always been a big problem for her.

“It would help me to understand who you are, where you want to take me, who it is you want me to talk to, and for what reason.”

Then, something coming in to his inner world, he checked out again. He got up and paced around, and by the movements, she knew he was communicating, and something suggested he wasn’t happy about whatever he was hearing.

His communication and pacing was then interrupted by a heated argument going on in the next room. He left her and went out the door, closing it behind him.

She heard him say something in Spanish, but too low for her to make out at first. But the discussion got louder and suddenly, with a stunning shock, she recognized the voice of her kidnapper. It was from a long time ago, near the wind-down of the Afghanistan war.

That’s him, she thought.

Johnny Cash!

They’d had to nickname him because soldiers in his tier of special ops didn’t come into Bagram’s hospital with names, only numbers. Only this man didn’t come in, she’d actually brought him herself from the Swat Valley disaster on the border of Pakistan.

Yes, definitely him, and he sensed something.

When he was finally able to talk, it was with that reconstructed voice box. This guy had to be the one she’d worked on to save, the one nobody thought could survive. He was nicknamed Johnny Cash because of the deep, gravelly voice.

He’s the one who became the miracle survivor of a horrific disaster. At Bagram hospital’s Craig Joint Theater Hospital, her team worked on him for days. It was the most advanced “Level 3” facility and handled 4000 wounded warriors a month, but few with his degree of wounds survived.

Johnny Cash was a complete mess when they got him to the hospital. Plastic surgery, brain surgery, abdominal surgery. But he was one she’d brought in and the one she’d been determined to save, even when some of the other doctors considered him a lost cause.

She’d been flying around from the different airfields, helping to train flight paramedics on new procedures. So many injured died before arriving at the Bagram Airfield hospital, or Kabul, that it was criminal in her opinion and a main reason she helped orchestrate new, enhanced critical-care techniques that would eventually give patients a 65% higher survival rate simply because of things like delivering oxygen to soldiers with severe brain injuries.

Absolutely JC, she thought. She was stunned. Her kidnapper was her greatest war save.

She was a young-gun neurosurgeon out on a test run with new oxygen equipment, advising the team on the 455th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evac flight when the horrific chopper crash happened and they were the closest available evac team.