The Identity Mine

XL

Ethan dashed out of the police station, his cell phone in his hand as he hurried toward his vehicle.

‘Jarvis’

‘Hannah Ford was implanted,’ Ethan said as he reached the pool car. ‘The Chinese must have got to her when she was in Hong Kong.’

‘But she was checked, scanned!’ Jarvis protested. ‘She was clean when they passed through the airport!’

‘Well, somehow the Chinese got something into her and they’re not telling us what!’

‘Where is she now?’

‘She’s in custody,’ Ethan replied. ‘She got into a gunfight with Nassir and he got away, started shooting the place up before we got there.’

‘I just got a call from her partner, Vaughn,’ Jarvis revealed. ‘They’re starting to understand what’s happening here and that they’re being set up somehow. I think they might come over to our side.’

‘I can’t be sure if the Chinese wanted to help Nassir escape or were trying to gun him down, but Hannah wasn’t in her own mind. It’s possible that they might have been using Hannah to catch or kill Abrahem.’

Jarvis’s voice brooked no argument.

‘Get to the White House,’ he ordered. ‘Nassir will head there while he still has enough time to take the President down. He’ll have to be close by, near enough that he can see his plan come to fruition before his eyes. He’s not going to want to watch this go down on a television somewhere.’

‘Agreed. What about Hannah?’

‘I’ll worry about her! You get to Nassir before he gets to the President!’

Ethan stood alongside his car and looked at the traffic building up on the nearby freeway, lines of stationary vehicles, horns honking and bodywork glinting in brilliant flares of white light in the heat.

‘There’s no way I’m going to get to the Capitol by car,’ he replied. ‘You’re right though. Nassir’s a hands on killer, he’s not going to stand by and watch this from afar. My guess is that he’ll be on foot, maybe in the crowds somewhere.’

‘I’ll get the MPD onto it with their helicopters,’ Jarvis replied, ‘they’ll be able…. see more than… and pick him up more quickly… we could on… own.’

‘You’re breaking up Doug,’ Ethan replied as he looked about. ‘I must be in a dead — zone or something. I’ll have to call you back and…’

Ethan’s train of thought slammed to a halt and he stared at his cell phone again.

‘You there, Ethan?’

‘Yeah, I’m here,’ he replied, still staring at his cell’s screen.

The screen was showing a signal of two bars, but Ethan recalled reading somewhere that nobody actually knew what the bars on cell screens really meant. It was possible to hold a cell phone call with one bar, or be cut off with five. The signal icon on his cell at least suggested that the reception was weak, perhaps affected by the heat and the high buildings surrounding the police station.

‘What is it?’

‘Damn me,’ Ethan said finally. ‘I think I know how they’re getting signals to the victims, how they control them.’

‘How?’

‘Grab cell phone data from the date of the attack at Fort Benning! Run it against any of the signals detected coming out of Fort Benning, anything at all!’

Ethan waited as he heard Jarvis and Hellerman running the data onto one of their computer screens. A few moments passed and then Jarvis came back on the line.

‘According to this the cell towers between Parkwood, where General Thompson set off, and Fort Benning both recorded an identical cell phone signal that remained active from just before the general left his home until the moment he took his own life. The frequency of the transmission matches precisely that detected at Fort Benning — eight hundred eighty hertz.’

‘Genius,’ Hellerman whispered in the background, audible now as Jarvis switched his own cell to speaker, ‘absolute genius.’

‘They used cell phones to relay the signals, didn’t they,’ Ethan said.

‘Cell phones, everybody’s got one,’ Hellerman said. ‘They’re one of our most ubiquitous devices and we carry them on our person. They hacked the general’s cell phone and used it to relay signals to the implant in his skull. I’ll be damned, it’s like they dialed into his brain.’

‘Can we trace that cell?’ Ethan asked.

‘They’ll have tossed it,’ Jarvis said.

‘It’s their Achilles Heel,’ Ethan said. ‘Hannah attacked Nassir’s storage depot, but according to her partner half way through the attack she suddenly faltered and looked as though she were waking up from a dream. If Abrahem Nassir is using cell phone networks to control his victims, then it makes sense that he would set up shop in an area where cell phone reception is weak. The area of Bethesda he was in is a dead — zone, hardly any reception at all, and it may have caused the Chinese to lose their control of Hannah.’

‘Which would prevent anybody from using his own technology against him,’ Jarvis surmised, ‘and make it harder for them to track him down. But surely the White House must be protected against cellular signals?’

‘Maybe the White House but not necessarily the lawns. If Majestic Twelve are hoping for Abrahem Nassir to succeed, they’ll have somebody on those lawns boosting the signals. We need to figure out who and fast,’ Ethan said. ‘The District isn’t known for being the best when it comes to cell phone reception and I can’t believe that Abrahem wouldn’t have known that when he came here.’

‘I’ll inform Lopez and the Secret Service,’ Jarvis said. ‘Get to the White House as soon as you can. I’ll get Lopez to identify the source of the signals both inside and outside of the White House.’

‘Don’t risk letting Abrahem finish his mission,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If we have to shut the ceremony down, then do it!’

‘Leave that to me. Jarvis out.’

Jarvis cut off the line and Ethan stared at his cell phone for a moment longer. General Thompson had been in possession of his cell phone when he had died, the device in the pocket of his uniform. Commander Sandy Veiron had also had his cell phone on him in the cockpit of his F–18E Hornet when he had ploughed into the deck of his aircraft carrier, pilots often using the devices to take photographs of other aircraft while flying operationally.

A cell phone was carried by almost every human being in the western world and the perfect vessel through which to pass signals to the devices implanted into the heads of victims of the Chinese or Abrahem Nassir. Ethan knew that there were devices capable of blocking all cell phone signals, disrupting communications and preventing Nassir and his people from taking control of human minds, but there was no way that the entire network could be protected all at once. If Nassir had a person on the inside, then Ethan knew that if he was close enough he would be able to boost his signals and get anybody in the vicinity who had been implanted to attack the President from close range.

Ethan glanced at the nearby traffic once again and made his decision. He turned away from his vehicle and hurried across the lot until he saw what he wanted. Ethan hurried across the lot and crouched down alongside a massive Harley Davidson Sportster 883, hurriedly pulling wires from behind the clocks and after he had examined them for a few moments he cut two of them and then stood up. He used a pocket knife to jack open the seat compartment and expose the battery, then touched one end of the bare wire to the twelve volt positive terminal. He connected the other end to the feed wire on the coil, then took his second wire and connected the solenoid and the starter. The big V — Twin engine coughed into life as Ethan secured the wires in place and slammed the seat back down over the battery.

‘You done there, boy?’

Ethan turned and saw four bikers standing watching him, their muscular arms folded across broad chests and bulging bellies, eyes hard and cold. The sound of the motorbike’s rumbling engine had masked their approach. One of them slipped a blade from beneath his jacket, the steel glinting in the sunlight.

‘I need your bike,’ Ethan replied. ‘If I don’t use it, we may be facing World War Three.’

The bikers stared at him for a moment and then they chuckled grimly. Their leader, a man with a thick and drooping moustache that framed his thin lips, smiled back at Ethan.

‘Well why didn’t you say so? I’ll call Iron Man for you.’

Ethan didn’t want to shoot them, but the man with the blade moved toward Ethan so he reached beneath his jacket and whipped his pistol out.

‘Bad idea,’ he snapped at the knifeman.

The knifeman smiled as his companions immediately pulled knives of their own and sneered at Ethan.

‘Real bad idea!’

Ethan didn’t have time to argue with the bikers and he sure as hell couldn’t fight all four of them but he could see that despite their bulging biceps and chests they were old, fat and out of shape. He jumped backwards onto the Harley’s seat and swung one leg over the saddle as with one hand he closed the clutch. Then he stamped down on the gear lever with his boot even as the bikers’ lunged toward him and swung their blades. The Harley’s engine changed note and Ethan opened the clutch a fraction as he reached back and twisted the throttle.

The Harley thundered into motion, the big — bore engine jerking Ethan away from the bikers’ grasp as two of the blades flashed down and scraped across the bike’s tail. Ethan let the bike roll across the lot, looking over his shoulder as he turned for the exit between the ranks of cars. The bikers lumbered in pursuit, screaming obscenities at him, but their faces were already sheened with sweat and he could see that they would never catch him. Their leader threw his knife, which whistled past Ethan’s shoulder and clattered against a parked Ford as Ethan left them behind.

Ethan reached the exits, stopped the bike and then turned around on the seat before kicking the Harley back into gear. Within minutes he was riding the up ramp onto the freeway and began scything through the traffic heading north toward the Capitol.

The only way to pin down Abrahem now was to find the vehicle that would be used to control whomever his people had implanted, which Ethan knew would have to be capable of emitting signals with a high enough intensity to break through the lousy reception range in the vicinity of the White House. He rode one — handed as he pulled his cell phone out and dialed a number, gambling that his elevated position on the freeway might get a signal through.