Gorgon

CHAPTER 39

Colonel Jack Hammerson read the Magera report and shook his head. ‘This goddamn world will never cease to amaze me.’

He closed the folder and fed the hardcopy version into a shredder. The online version he allocated to deep storage in the underground information silos beneath USSTRATCOM.

He picked up the next folder, and pulled at his lip as he read its contents. It was a report on a covert surveillance operation on a private citizen. He looked at the photograph of the mother and child. He knew the woman well, but she wasn’t what interested him. With her was a child, a boy, less than two years old. He studied the face, the gray-blue eyes, piercing, serious. The next shot showed the boy holding up one end of a ride-on car with another kid in it. The child was lifting their combined weight with one hand.

‘Like father, like son,’ Hammerson said. He flipped the folder onto the desk and rubbed his eyes, then sat back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Ah, Aimee — there are no secrets left in this world any more.’ He sighed. ‘So, now what do we do with you, and Joshua?’

The interrogation rooms beneath the Kremlin were for special guests only. They were tiled and insulated, containing the screams that frequently emanated from within, and making them easy to hose out.

President Vladimir Volkov looked down at the man strapped to the gurney. A metal spike extended from his nostril, with wires leading from it to a box that sent a mild electrical current into the area of his brain between the hippocampus and amygdala. Captain Robert Graham twitched, and babbled nonstop, even though his lips were parchment-dry. The doctor pulled up one of his eyelids to examine the rolled-back orb. The captain showed no physical response to the touch.

‘He has told us everything he knows about the Arcadian treatment and the subject,’ the doctor said. ‘He has no more secrets.’

Volkov grunted. ‘Get the information down to the labs. I want the treatments duplicated and commenced immediately.’

‘It seems they didn’t have much success,’ the doctor commented. ‘Only one Arcadian out of over a hundred experiments.’

Volkov shrugged. ‘That is still one in a hundred. And we have 10,000 volunteers waiting in our gulags.’

‘And Captain Graham?’ the doctor asked. ‘He will never function normally again. Disposal?’

Volkov’s mouth turned down momentarily. ‘No, keep him alive. Let his brain empty completely. Who knows what other useful information he may have stored in there.’ He stripped off his gloves and dropped them to the floor. ‘So, now we make our own Arcadians.’ He grinned, wolf-like. ‘And in Russia, everything is bigger and better.’