The Judas Contact (Boomers Book 1) (13 page)

“I didn’t want you to shoot him. Does he have a gun that you can see?” The too-patient tone began to wear on her nerves.

She twisted in the seat. She’d seen Garrett wearing guns beneath his jacket once. But none seemed visible in the van. The really big guns in the back didn’t count. She wasn’t sure she could even lift one of those.

“Not unless he has it in a shoulder holster. Why do I need a weapon?”

“Because his chip ordered him to protect you. If you endanger yourself, it might break through whatever this protocol is.”
Oh.
That wasn’t terribly unreasonable. But she didn’t have any weapons…

She didn’t need them. Taking a deep breath, she reached out to brush her fingers against his face. The van swerved and she dropped the phone and whacked her head on the window. Garrett’s eyes blazed at her as he held her left wrist in his grip and fought to get the van back under control with his free hand.

The speed dropped and the rattling ceased.

“Ilsa?” Simon’s voice drifted up, tinny and quiet.

“You said you wouldn’t touch me, dammit,” Garrett demanded, his face a mask of fury. He pulled the van off the expressway at the first exit, her wrist still firmly shackled. “And why the fuck are we in the van?”

“Ilsa! Pick up the phone.” Simon’s voice punched into the silence. He must have shouted to be that loud.

Garrett glanced toward her feet and released her. “Get the phone.”

Pain sparked in her fingertips, pins and needles racing into her numb hand to stab feeling back into it. She picked up the phone with shaking fingers and put it to her ear. “He’s back.”

“On speaker.” The van shuddered to a halt and he slammed the vehicle into park. She palmed the phone and hit the speaker button. “Simon, were you planning to take me back to the city whether I wanted to go there or not?”

Hostility rolled off him in waves.

“No, Garrett. I wasn’t in the driver’s seat.” Why the hell did he think Simon had anything to do with this adventure escaped her.

“Then why are we in the van?”

“Doctor Blaine was just explaining to me that you were testing the chip.” His teammate seemed to be choosing his words carefully and kept his tone neutral.

“Yeah, but that was at the house…we’re…” he looked around, his murderous expression quieting to merely thunderous. “Not there anymore.”

“We’re on the expressway. You got out of the machine, walked upstairs, loaded weapons into the van and tried to leave without me.” Her wrist throbbed, the black and blue bruises darkening with a fresh ring of purple around her wrist. She didn’t think he broke it, but it wasn’t terrifically thrilled with her either.

“What are you talking about?” The confusion clouding his green eyes was a welcome change from the blank emptiness and her heart pinged in sympathy.

“We used images. You said the chip went active. Then after the last image, you said ‘holy crap’ and got up and left.”

Garrett blinked slowly and shook his head. “That’s not what I remember.”

“What do you remember?” She asked the question right on top of Simon.

“Nothing. I was in the FMRI and now I’m here.” He glanced down at her wrist and sighed. “And you tried to touch me again.”

“I did touch you, several times—on your arms—but until I tried to touch your face nothing worked.”

“I told you it’s dangerous.” He growled.

“Go easy, Garrett. I told her she needed to endanger herself to see if it would wake you up—which it obviously did. I didn’t expect her to go for skin contact, but it was effective. Smart thinking, Doctor Blaine.”

“Smart thinking?” Garrett crushed the phone.

Ilsa winced. That couldn’t be good.

* * * *

His temper worsened by the time he pulled them back into the garage of the Hamptons house. He couldn’t believe he was behind the wheel of the van, rushing her back into the city, oblivious to whatever he was doing. He called Michael to tell him to back off, that everything was fine but the Captain ignored him. He and Rory would be in Montauk in a couple of hours. Michael relented about coming to the house.

But he would be watching.

Garrett couldn’t argue with that. He’d endangered Ilsa without provocation or clear understanding of why. Thankfully, she remained silent after he crushed the phone. He owed her an apology. One he didn’t quite understand, but he knew he owed it to her. He was supposed to protect her, instead he’d dragged her out into the line of fire.

She sat in the van after he exited it, and he stared at the passenger door, waiting. Her blonde ponytail had come loose sometime between when he went into the machine and woke up on the side of the road. He thumped the door with his fist, one knock.

With a sigh, she unbuckled herself and opened the door, left wrist cradled to her chest. He had hurt her this time. Another flog for his conscience. Her mouth opened, as though about to speak, and he held up a finger.

“Downstairs. I’ll secure myself in the iso room and then we talk.” Whatever the hell she’d tripped in his brain, he had to accept that
he
put her in danger. If she’d succeeded in touching his face while he languished in that blank state—his heart shuddered.

They were silent as they made their way through the house. He armed the security system. “If it happens again—the red button on any of the security pads will lock the house down. I won’t be able to get out.”

“Really? Even with the elephant guns you put in the back of the van?” Her words dripped with skepticism and what suspiciously sounded like humor.

“Just do that. Don’t jump in the van.” His gut clenched. The house remained exactly as it had been, with nothing out of place. According to his watch, they hadn’t been gone longer than an hour.

It seemed like centuries. Downstairs, in the laboratory, he walked over to the clean room, let himself in and shut the door. “Hit the code to lock the door.”

“You realize that’s ridiculous. You’re armed.” Ilsa folded her arms under her breasts, pushing them up against the white tank top. Dressed in purple shorts and the tank, barefoot save for the gold chain around her left ankle, she looked like a woman ready for a day at the beach—not a doctor conducting a study.

“Work with me, Ilsa. Please?” He rapped the door and pointed at the keypad. She rolled her eyes and thumbed in the code. The code he’d told her. Garrett sighed. Locking him in wasn’t all that effective when he could let himself out easily enough. He planted his gloved hands against the steel tempered glass and stared at her.

“Are you calmer now?” She studied him, her mouth a flat line of disapproval.

“What happened?” They didn’t have time to play games. He texted Simon to have Rex on standby. If he couldn’t get it together, they needed someone on site who could contain him. He couldn’t hurt Rex in his shifted form.

“As far as I could tell, your chip began responding to images. You said it was active when I showed you pictures of the Flatiron and the World Trade Center.”

His mind sizzled, a crackling noise like an old world radio firing up. Information on the World Trade Center scrolled across his vision. He’d seen these computer type readouts before.

“Garrett?” Ilsa planted her hand against the glass, opposite his own. “What are you seeing?”

“Information. Statistics. Loss of life. Calculating the force and the damage inflicted on the buildings during nine eleven. Standard historical data.” He blinked twice. It was supposed to clear the data, but the scroll continued for seconds pass his first blink.

“Anything resembling a command?”

He shook his head once. “No. We knew that the World Trade Center attack was a pivotal event. It was part of what Simon called the cascade. We tried to stop it, but even with everything we knew—we weren’t successful.”

“There were differences? It didn’t follow the historical data in your head?” She swallowed once and pain rippled across her face. He’d seen that look on any number of faces in the intervening years. The regret. The loss. The cascade affected everyone, even those who weren’t present.

“Yes. They were subtle, but they were there.” His heart continued to race, slowing only when the casualty data ceased.

“Like what? Specifically. What differed from the historical data?” She stayed right where she was, hand mirroring his against the glass, gaze locked. He stared in her eyes and breathing got easier. His pulse and respiration calmed. The sweat trickling down his back began to cool.

“The use of Logan Airport—the actual time of the strikes. The day was off. It was supposed to be the twelfth, not the eleventh. It was supposed to happen later in the morning, closer to lunchtime.” The changes infuriated them. They’d been prepared to avert, ready to act, and the time had changed. It was like being caught in the crossfire of two snipers—hell and regret—without any cover.

“So the data you work off of depended on the five of you not actually being here.” Her throat flexed with a swallow and her lips tipped up into a small, yet sympathetic smile. “Has the historical data ever been one hundred percent accurate?”

“In the first five years. We prevented two assassinations.” They’d discussed that at length. The slippage in the data, the gradual variances—so minute at first.

“Any that never happened at all?”

“Yes.”

“And what about Wall Street?”

 A tingle spread through his nervous system. The word “eliminate” scrolled across his mind’s eye and he clenched his fist. Wall Street was home to any number of financial institutions, including the one the Boomers used to manage their funds. It cost millions to keep them supplied and well-armed—Simon’s financial investments kept them flush with the money they needed.

Protests on Wall Street turned violent in 2018, including the bombing of the Merrick Financial Building. A bombing that left fifteen hundred dead and thousands more injured. But that hadn’t happened yet. Wasn’t
due
to happen yet.

Eliminate the threat.

“Were there people in that photograph?” he asked. It was like the memory of the image blurred, fuzzing out faces and leaving only posture, signs and the Merrick building in sharp relief in the background.

Wait. It wasn’t even the Merrick building yet. The Merrick Financial Corporation would be founded in 2017. By 2020, it managed more than four percent of the world’s wealth. The destruction of their building created ripples on Wall Street. The great crash of 2018 allowed for larger companies to gobble up smaller ones.

Essentially allowing for the first mega corporations. Pain pulsed behind his right eye.

“Yes. There were.”

“I want to see them. Show it to me again.” He pushed past the pain and focused on the concern in her face.

“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “I’ll send the image to your people—actually, I’ll send it to Rory. That way none of your chips activate on whatever set you off. But you have a command pattern in there and I need to study it.”

It was the smart move.

He didn’t like it though. He didn’t trust Rory. The hellion distracted Michael, turned him against his teammates and created more trouble than she was worth. Halo’s identifying info scrolled across his mind’s eye and he scowled.

Ilsa folded her arms again, cradling her bad wrist. “It’s the sensible decision. We also need to identify if you have a code word trigger to release you from the command.”

“A code word?”

“Yeah. I programmed one for my dogs. I lost two in the early implementation when they just kept going, even though they already were home. It was like they couldn’t stop looking for it despite having arrived.” Her lips pursed. “Garrett?”

“Yeah?”

“Scorpio.”

His vision wavered, the pain in his head receded. He staggered and hit his knees. His body weighed a ton and it was like struggling to stand with a second full man standing on his shoulders. His lips formed her name, but darkness winked out the light.

“How is Garrett?” Simon leaned back in his chair. Nothing seemed to be running according to plan. They were divided on how to proceed. Michael wanted the tests stopped. Rex wanted them to push further, but Drake reserved his opinion until Garrett could be questioned. Shut down by a verbal command, Garrett was still unconscious. Rex had joined Michael and Rory in Montauk and traveled to the house. An unconscious Garrett couldn’t control the toxins in his body, but Rex could shift his own molecules and become impenetrable to the illness.

“He’s sleeping.” Rex’s drawl offered a familiar comfort. “According to the doc, his vitals are normal, his breathing regular. She said if it worked as it did in her dogs,” he said the last with the hint of a snicker, “he’ll probably sleep for the next ten to twelve and wake up normal. He’ll also have his chip reset.”

“That’s a big if. She’s also counting on the idea that our chips were mapped from her original designs.” He couldn’t fault the theory. They’d chosen Ilsa Blaine because her work seemed to most closely replicate what they knew about the chips. Rory vouched for her, but it was Garrett’s support of the doctor that interested Simon most. Despite a slower progression, their poisoner seemed to be gaining the same deeply protective instinct over Ilsa that Michael had for Rory.

Which could mean borrowing trouble if Simon was forced to mindwipe the scientist. They’d debated that, prior to Rory’s meeting, and again when Garrett volunteered to take her to the Long Island house for research. If she couldn’t be trusted, Simon could sift her memories out, erase her contact with and knowledge of them, and then release her.
But that’s probably not an option anymore.

“Yeah, but I looked at the research. She walked me through it and talked me into an FMRI of my own. She also wants to do a couple of scans. My chip, from the initial look she took, is different from Garrett’s. It may be that all our chips are different—” Ilsa’s voice interrupted him.

“Tell him whatever technology they used relied on DNA. It’s how they circumvented your systems from rejecting them.”

“Put me on speaker, Rex.”
And next time tell me when she is right there.
The last he sent as a mental order. The shifter snickered again. Rex took things too lightly sometimes—which wasn’t a fair assessment. Unlike the rest of the team, Rex left someone, two someones behind in the future they were trying to stop from occurring. His blasé attitude and good humor were both in self-defense.