Stephen Cannell - Runaway Heart

"Let's see if what we've been building is really worth all this trouble," Victor Valdez said, thinking that at least this would add some excitement to a monumental cluster-fuck. "Tell Silver to put a chip vest on the unit with full abort-destroy capabilities. I don't want to leave any DNA behind if it goes bad."

Talbot nodded and left the room.

Twenty minutes later, a helicopter was touching down in the desert north of Palm Springs. Its landing lights illuminated the sagebrush and sand that blew under the chopper, tattooing the side of an old weathered barn. The pilot was from a DOD scramble flight group in L.A., but he'd never been out in this part of the desert before. The area was restricted by a Code 61, which prohibited flyovers without special DOD clearance. When he landed, the chopper captain was puzzled because the place looked deserted just barren miles of fenced, open desert. He watched as four men ran out of the old barn dressed in black government assault gear, flak-jacketed with body armor, and packing fully automatic MP-5S with thirty-round clips. Two of them were wheeling a metal cage. They slid the heavy box into the bay of the helicopter and piled in after it. The pilot looked back. There was Something alive in the box. For a second he saw unearthly fingers come out and grasp the metal bars, but then they disappeared inside the cage. What the hell? Then he heard heavy breathing and a very strange noise, unlike anything he'd ever heard before, high-pitched and angry. Suddenly, a dank, fetid odor clogged his nostrils.

"Shhh, Pan," one of the soldiers said.

"Let's go. Get it up," Ranger Captain Dave Silver ordered as he jumped into the helicopter.

The pilot pulled back the collective and the Bell Jet Ranger lifted off the desert floor, heading toward the landing pad on top of the Federal Building in San Francisco.

Roland was still hunched over his computer working off-line an hour after he had finished the download from Gen-A-Tec.

He was in the zone.

It happened like that sometimes you just lost track of everything. He couldn't get Herman on the cell phone, and the overweight attorney wasn't at Streisand's house, so Roland finished composing an e-mail to Strockmire and sent it off to Herman's computer.

TO:strockmeister@earthlink.net

FROM:cyberhood@thirdwave.net

SUBJECT:no subject CC:

I want a raise… I'm too fucking good… I have again saved your dumpy white ass amp; am expecting some big bucks in return. No more of your empty promises. Send $$$!!! (heh-heh-heh)

I am e-mailing some?-loads I got from the Gen-A-Tec computer. I was magnificent, by the way. I wrecked the SA they had on night duty out there. Stole all this shit right out from under his bony ass.

Enc. include the RESH file on corn, e-m# amp; some skeevy

looking encryptions that were filed under DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA is a secret gov't weapons research org I've heard some evil shit about… I think we found some bodacious bogosity. Why would gov't spooks be investing in food research? What evil lurks? Gen-A-Tec had this program coded in a secure data bank so this is DEFINITELY something they don't want seen.

If you or Susie get a chance, run this out to Zimmy, my bud I told you about. He's a cryptology freak who plays with this kinda shit when no one's looking after-hours. He ties ten sun solar mega-workstations together amp; does complicated decoding problems for fun. He'll jump at this challenge, but keep it to yourself, Strock, 'cause if they catch him he'll get booted for misuse of computer time. Zimmy should be able to break this in a few nights of gut-tickling fun (heh-heh-heh).

PS: There was something else in the Gen-A-Tec computer that was encrypted a short line that I'm doing myself.

(I need my workout, too.) I'll let you know if it turns into

anything juicy. In the meantime…

I remain the one and only. MASTER OF THE GAME

After he sent the e-mail, Roland went back to work decoding the short line of code he had found in the Gen-A-Tec database. Like his buddy Zimmy, Roland thought that breaking code was a wonderful mind game. He had been working for a half hour and already had three letters. He wrote them on a paper cocktail napkin on his bedside table, then looked down at the letters once again, wondering what they might stand for:

He was just starting the cracking sequence on the fourth.

OCT. October, maybe? But why would Gen-A-Tec go to all the trouble of decoding the name of a month? Probably because it wasn't a month. It was something else. Then his program beeped and he quickly had the next letter, O.

October: the tenth month. Ten maybe? He wrote it down. October? Octogeneric? Octopod? Keep going, he thought. He was already over halfway through deciphering it and started running sequences on the next two symbols.

The windowless van had been parked outside the new Fairview Hotel for almost ten minutes when Ranger Captain Dave "Hi-Ho" Silver returned. He was dressed in a black business suit, and he immediately began stripping off his tie as soon as he got back inside the vehicle that was loaded with video and sound monitors.

"I think Valdez must be psychic," Captain Silver said. They have security cameras on all the floors… in boxes. We could disable the one on his floor, or maybe throw the hotel video system into temporary phase jitter, but it's not gonna be covert and will take too much time, so I'm gonna put a DU down."

The entire response-retrieval team looked at the heavy metal cage on the floor of the van. They couldn't see the DU but they could smell it and hear it breathing.

"Pan," Captain Silver said. "It's time."

Pan is sitting in the box, his Geega thoughts coming slowly at first. Most times Pan uses only his strange language of the dark place. His memories of a shadowed past are verdant, humid, and atmospheric. Murderous urges are at times just below the surface, more powerful than even the Geega's commands. He has to fight to keep these urges under control, to do what the alpha Geega wants. The murderous impulse is natural to him, like tasting blood, or eating meat, or the savage instinct of the kill. Hunting and killing are deep inside Pan, although shadowed and obscured. The other things the Geegas want him to do are much harder. Geegas feed him and tell him things. They make him run, and kill, and work with their fire-sticks. Geegas are alpha and Pan knows he has to obey them. Sometimes he presents himself to the main Geega, turning around, raising his privates, offering himself to be fucked. But the alpha Geega never accepts Pan's presentation. Pan then lowers his head to the alpha Geega's feet, placing his soft pink lips in the sand, humbling himself But the alpha Geega just says his strange speaking words that Pan has to struggle to understand. Then Pan turns back and sits, waiting to be told what he must do. They are the leaders. He is nothing. He is alive only at their pleasure. On his arm is the machine to make the Geega talk. He looks down at it and finds the symbols on the keyboard. He punches in two syllables and waits. An electronic voice emits from his vest:

"Pan go?" It says with metallic Geega precision.

"Thirty stories up," the alpha Geega answers.

Pan cocks his head and tries to listen, tries to do the Geega talk… so hard for him, but he can do it. Pan looks down at the thing on his arm with all the buttons and little symbols that he has practiced on for hours. It does the Geega talk for him, but he has to concentrate for a minute to decide how to make the right talk. Pan pushes several buttons and waits while the strange Geega voice comes out of the heavy vest that he wears, with its lightbox screen and cold metal straps.