Jude Hardin - The Reacher Code - Timestream 1

“You’re surrounded,” a voice from a loudspeaker said. “We are authorized to use deadly force, so it would be in your best interest to surrender now. I repeat: we are authorized to use deadly force.”

No kidding, Wahlman thought. He’d already been pelted by a dozen or so bullets, each of them feeling like a bare-fisted punch from a prizefighter. Maybe they were planning to hit him with something heavier. Like a missile. He’d known that was a possibility. Otherwise he would have taken his chances with the tires and tried to get up to speed out on the road. Which, in hindsight, might have been the best course of action anyway. He thought about that as he weaved through the trees, trying to use the lights from the helicopters to his advantage, trying to stay focused as the sweat poured down his back in streams.

His vision was getting blurry, and he was breathing heavily, and he felt shaky all over. He needed to go ahead and spin. Now. Otherwise, he was going to die. But he couldn’t get the speed up to where it needed to be. Not in the woods. He needed a straightaway. He needed to be back out on the road.

The suit certainly wouldn’t protect him from a missile, but he didn’t feel as though he had much of a choice at this point. Dead is dead, whether it’s from dehydration or from being blown to bits. He dizzily decided to turn back and head for the road, knowing that his odds of survival were getting slimmer by the second, knowing that he probably wouldn’t make it anyway but unable to come up with any sort of viable alternative. He started to make the turn, noticed something straight ahead, some kind of drainage ditch with some kind of clearing on the other side of it.

A clearing that probably ran the length of the ditch, Wahlman thought. To move heavy machinery in and out. Bulldozers and whatnot. For maintenance. All he had to do was get to the other side of the ditch. Then he would have the straightaway he needed.

He motored up to the edge of the channel. It was wide. Thirty feet, maybe. And there was water at the bottom of it. Three or four feet. Too deep to try to ride through.

Wahlman had never done any sort of stunt riding, and he didn’t want to start now. He didn’t want to, but he had to. The only way to get to the other side of the ditch was to jump it.

Slopes had been built up on both sides. Wahlman didn’t know if they were steep enough to serve as ramps, and he didn’t know what kind of speed he would need to make it across even if they were. It was all going to be guesswork. Not exactly ideal for such a crucial situation. If he made it to the other side, there was a good chance that he would make it home. If he didn’t make it to the other side, there was a good chance that he would die.

A very good chance.

In fact, as a missile whistled through the branches and exploded about fifty feet behind him, he figured it was pretty much guaranteed.

He thought about the foil packet in his wallet, suddenly remembering what the capsule and the tablets were for. He pulled the packet out and tore it open and dropped the pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry, nearly choking on the larger of the two tablets. He stuffed the empty envelope back into his wallet and stuffed the wallet into his pocket and backed up and worked the throttle and popped the clutch and shot forward and hit the slope. Suddenly he was airborne, moving in slow motion, the deafening chop of the helicopter rotors abruptly silent now, as if a switch had been thrown. There was a cool breeze blowing and there were stars in the sky and Kasey was on the seat holding him tightly from behind and telling him how much she loved him, and he knew that it was all just in his head but it seemed very real, like dreams do sometimes, and he wondered if he’d died already. Then he knew that he hadn’t when he slammed down on the other side of the ditch, knew from the pain of the impact that he was still very much alive. His heart was pounding and his head was throbbing and his mouth felt like sandpaper and his instincts took over and he skidded around and hit the straightaway and pegged the throttle and heard another missile screaming toward him as he pressed the button to spin back to 2101.

22

McDaniels glanced down at the countdown display for the millionth time, and then he stepped over to the window that looked out into the hangar. Stahler should have been back by now. He still had a little over three minutes left on his fifty-seven minute allotment, but he’d never cut it this close before.

“He’s not going to make it, is he?” Victor said, looking very concerned.

Victor had come to the control room to greet Stahler himself, to congratulate him on a successful double mission—on eliminating Wahlman and protecting Reacher from the current threat.

“There’s still time,” McDaniels said. “But I have to tell you, it’s not looking promising at this point.”

“Which means that Reacher is probably dead by now.”

“That’s certainly a possibility.”

“Which would put the entire SuperSoldier program in jeopardy.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

Before McDaniels could finish his thought, the room filled with the high-pitched whine that always preceded the arrival of a returning operative.

“Maybe it’s going to be okay after all,” Victor said, joining McDaniels at the window.

A pulsing globe of light appeared above Stahler’s pedestal, followed by an arcing burst of electrical energy, similar to a lightning strike. As the smoke started to clear, McDaniels could see that Stahler had chosen to switch to a motocross bike and a bulletproof racing suit. He could also see that Stahler was slumped over the handlebars, apparently unconscious.

“He’s probably dehydrated,” McDaniels said. “We need to get him out of that suit.”

“It’s not Stahler,” Victor said.

“Pardon me?”

“The man on the bike is a lot bigger than Stahler. It has to be Wahlman.”

McDaniels took another look. Victor was right. The man on the motorcycle was probably four or five inches taller than Stahler and probably outweighed him by forty or fifty pounds.

“But that’s impossible,” McDaniels said. “The machines are programmed to—”

“He must have hacked it somehow,” Victor said.

“Unbelievable,” McDaniels said, lifting the telephone receiver from its cradle. “I’ll call for an ambulance, but we need to go ahead and get him out of the suit. Can you give me a hand out there real quick?”

Victor snatched the receiver and slid it back onto its base.

“Leave him there,” he said. “Let him die. That’s what we wanted to happen anyway.”

“We can’t just—”

“Sure we can.”

“We need to find out what happened to Stahler,” McDaniels said. “And we need to find out how Wahlman hacked into the DNA recognition system on that motorcycle. So we can prevent it from happening again. And to be honest, we still need him as an operative. The new candidates aren’t going to be ready to spin for a while, and I don’t think—”

“He might know that we sent Stahler to kill him,” Victor said. “And if he does, he’s not going to be anything but trouble for us.”

McDaniels thought about that.

“I can get the information I need,” he said. “Then I can wipe his memory for the past three or four days. It’ll be like it never happened. He’s a good operative, sir. The best. We should do everything we can to keep him around. At least until we can get the new guys trained.”

“The treatment you’re talking about—the one designed to erase specific chunks of time from a person’s memory—is still in the experimental phases, right?”

“Right.”

“Have you even performed any human trials yet?”