MIND FIELDS Read online

  Mason tried to open the door, but even the powerful body of the man with no neck was no match for the gnarled steel doorframe. Struggling against the newly deformed car, he tried in vain to free himself from the seat that wedged him against the steering column. Lightheaded from the exertion, he slumped back into the seat. Mason was not used to failing at physical contests; he let out a roar of frustration and grabbed for the phone in his pocket.

  “Yeah?” the voice on the other end answered.

  “It’s Mase. The son of a bitch blindsided me.”

  “He got away?” O’Grady said incredulously.

  “He got away.”

  “Where in the hell is he?”

  “Well, he ditched me at the bottom of a hill, knee deep in a river. Last I saw, he was heading north on State Road 437. It’s a little dirt road off of Scarborough Boulevard about five miles from BNI. His Jag’s got to be pretty banged up. Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”

  “Right. I’ll get somebody on it.”

  “And I could use a hand here.” He glanced down at the water trickling into the car. The level had risen about two inches since he had awakened. “Is my GPS beacon still working?”

  “Hang on.” O’Grady turned to his computer monitor and pulled up the GPS system. He scanned down a list and clicked on John Mason. A blip registered on the screen. “Yeah, I’ve got you, Mase. I’ll have somebody there as quick as I can.”

  “Sooner would be better than later.”

  “Hang tough,” O’Grady said. He felt foolish as soon as the words left his lips. They didn’t come any tougher than John Mason, and Jimmy O’Grady knew it.

  ___

  Paul’s nerves were frayed. He could still feel his hands trembling as he grasped the wheel. He rolled up to an abandoned farmhouse about five miles up the road from where he had rammed John “No-neck” Mason into the river. The Jag wobbled in along a dirt road into the dilapidated barn. Steam was hissing from the hood as he rolled to a stop next to a white Ford Taurus.

  The keys to the Taurus were tucked safely into Paul’s pants pocket. He opened the trunk; his briefcase was still there. After checking to make sure the Ford would start OK, Paul pulled out his cell phone and dialed Anderson’s number.

  JT was still at the office checking out the damage that had been wrought by Hingston’s getaway when his phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Harry Finch. He pulled out the phone and walked away from the BNI security guard.

  “Hello?”

  “How the hell are you, JT?”

  Anderson recognized Hingston’s voice. “What’re you sounding so smug about? I’ve got the disc and all you’ve got are a bunch of very angry, very dangerous men on your ass. I’d say you’re up the proverbial creek without a paddle.”

  “Yeah, well about that...you see, before I made a copy of those files, I e-mailed them to my computer...you can check that out if you want, and then I had my computer send those files to a couple of dozen other computers around the globe. Hard copies of those files are being produced as we speak, and the discs will be tucked safely away. If anything ever happens to me, those files will be released to the press. There’s some pretty damaging stuff there, JT. If I were you, I’d do everything I could to make sure that Paul Hingston lives to be a very old man, or at least that he outlives you.”

  “You son of a bitch. After everything I’ve done for you.”

  “Everything you’ve done? You’ve stolen my life, my career. You’ve killed the love of my life. You’ve made me an accomplice to a heinous crime against humanity. Oh yeah, I’d say you’ve done plenty, JT, and believe me, I won’t forget it.”

  “So why don’t you just turn those files over now? You want money, don’t you? How much?”

  “Damned right. I’m gonna need something to live off of. Those bloodsuckers you work with will never stop coming after me. You don’t really think they care about you, do you? They could care less whether that disc can ruin BNI.”

  “Maybe not, but they don’t want to lose the nanobots, and they sure as hell don’t want the kind of publicity those files can generate. They thrive on anonymity. No, you’ve played a good game, Paul. Looks like you hold all the cards.”

  “You don’t think I’m really stupid enough to stay on this line until you can trace me, do you? Look, check your e-mail when I hang up. There’s a Cayman bank account number there. If you want those files of yours to stay buried, make sure that fifty million dollars shows up in that account by five PM.”

  “Fifty million! Now look here, Paul...” Anderson stopped as he heard the line go dead. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  Paul Hingston drove off in the white Taurus. It took him twenty minutes to get to the Baltimore Washington International Airport. The fake ID’s had been surprisingly easy to get, and he was on his way to London by midnight.

  ___

  Donny Austin was sleeping in the apartment over his studio in downtown Baltimore. The Austin Photo Studio was a popular place for yuppies to bring their kids for the traditional annual birthday photos. Donny had built quite a reputation as a children’s photographer and had many high profile clients, the kind that brought him the occasional invite to holiday parties of the rich and famous. He had met Paul Hingston at one of these parties about a year ago. Donny was quite charismatic, and took full advantage of these parties to market his business. It was no big secret amongst this crowd that his photography skills were equally effective at producing high quality ID cards as they were at shooting pictures of toddlers. Donny was the man to come to if you needed a new identity and had the money to pay for the very best.

  The reputation of Donny Austin was not unknown to James O’Grady. In fact, Austin had done some fine work for him over the years. Agent John Mason was only too happy to check out the lead from his boss. Hingston had vanished after he left Mason for dead. There was no trace of his Jag anywhere. O’Grady figured that if Hingston was looking for a new identity, he’d find his way to Donny Austin. Hingston had made Mason look like a fool, and this was one agent who wasn’t about to let a few broken ribs keep him from tracking that weasel down.

  One swift kick from the tree-trunk leg of John Mason brought down the front door of Austin Studios. The shattering wood broke the silence inside the darkened building. There was a brief pause, then a frenetic clatter from an upstairs bedroom; a few seconds later Donny Austin appeared at the top of the stairs with a shotgun in his hand.

  “Who the hell’s there?” he barked out. As he reached to flip on the light, Mason’s arm stretched out and ripped the shotgun from Donny’s grasp before he even saw his assailant. Mase was amazingly quick for such a big man, and had been at the top of the steps waiting before Donny had time to get his gun and come through the door.

  Donny’s eyes bulged from their sockets as Mase dragged him back into the bedroom by his neck.

  “What say we have a little talk, photo boy.”

  Donny tried to answer, but couldn’t get a word through the tight grip around his throat. He nodded in agreement as he held onto Mason’s forearm with both hands.

  “Good boy,” Mase said as he tossed Donny into a chair.

  After that introduction, it was not hard to pry Paul Hingston’s new identity from the lips of the photographer. He was also only too happy to provide the new name of the woman that Paul had with him, along with the digital photo still stored in his computer.

  ___

  Sandi Fletcher had been waiting at the Kensington Gate Hotel in London for two days. She was too scared to venture out and had plenty of time to think about all of the terrible things that may have happened to Paul. She had decided that she would give him one more day. If he hadn’t shown by then, she would move on. She stood by the window, grasping the drapes and staring down to the street bel
ow, desperately hoping to see Paul at the entrance of the hotel. Her nerves were frayed and she ripped the curtain off of the first three hooks when the ring of the telephone tore into her concentration. She ran to grab the receiver.

  “Hello?” she said, hopefully.

  “San?” It was Paul’s voice.

  “Thank God. I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  “I’m in the lobby. I’ll be right up.”

  Paul knocked gently on the door of room 205 at about the same time that No-neck Mason was boarding a plane at BWI bound for Heathrow. O’Grady had arranged for Trace McKnight to meet him there.

  Sandi hesitated on the other side of the door.

  “It’s me, San. Open up.”

  Sandi opened the door and threw herself into Paul’s arms. She grasped desperately to his body, afraid to let go. Tears streamed down her cheek as the tension of the past three days burst free.

  “It’s OK,” he said softly. “Everything is going to be OK.” He said it in a way that convinced her that she was safe now, though he wished that he could feel as secure.

  “God, I can’t take any more of this,” she said to him as she wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  They walked into the room and closed the door.

  “Listen, San. I hate to have to do this,” he said, “but I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “What do you mean? You said it was over.” She clenched her fists and pounded them against his chest. “I can’t do this anymore,” she cried as she backed away and fell onto the edge of the bed, dropping her head into her hands.

  “I’m sorry, Sandi,” he said, pulling back the curtains and glancing out the window.

  “But how could they possibly find us here? We’re half way across the world, with new identities, no credit cards to trace, and...Hell, they don’t even know I’m alive.” She looked up at Paul. “They don’t, do they?” she asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think so, but they will find us, I’m sure of it. If I knew about Donny Austin, I’m sure Sean did too. It’s not like it was a big secret. Sooner or later they’ll go to Donny, and I doubt that they’ll have much trouble getting him to talk. Once they know our new ID’s, it won’t take them long to figure out where we went. In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  Sandi looked up incredulously. “You’re counting on it? Look, if you’ve got a death wish you can count me out. There are still a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

  “Me too, San, and I want to do them with you.”

  Sandi was totally confused; Paul could see it in her face. He placed his briefcase on the bed next to her and opened it. It was padded with thick blue foam on the inside, protecting two small vials and syringes.

  “What’s this?” she asked, hesitantly.

  “A little something I’ve been working on. All those weekends at BNI that they thought I was working on the Phase Two nanobots, I was really working on this. Nobody was around to notice. The weekends are dead quiet around that place and I had free run of the lab.”

  Paul pulled out one of the vials and held it up to the light. It was a lime green liquid with a faint iridescence. “I haven’t been able to do any human testing, but I’ve tested it on a half-dozen chimps with the same result every time.”

  “What is it, Paul?” she asked again.

  “It’s our ticket out,” he said. “It’s the Fountain of Youth.”

  Sandi was speechless as she stared at the glowing green liquid.

  “Aging is a simple matter of genetics,” he said. “I was sure that if I could come up with the right gene sequencing, I could find a way to program nanobots to reset the cells in our body to a nascent state; we could start our lives over with all our knowledge intact, but without the ravages that time has wreaked on our bodies.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Sandi said slowly. “You sent me off to London, lured the goons who want to kill us here, and now you want to shoot me up with an untested mutagen?”

  “Yup, that about sums it up,” Paul said.

  “OK then. And to think, I was worried that we might be in trouble.”

  They both laughed. It was a nervous laugh, but a cathartic one nonetheless. Paul carefully put the vial back into the case and closed it up. He sat next to Sandi on the bed and took her hand. “Look, if you don’t want to do this, I’ll understand. We can just try and outrun these guys, hide out in Africa or something. I’ve got enough money to last a lifetime.”

  Sandi was tempted to say yes, but she knew that their chances of staying hidden from a determined NSA agent were slim.

  “So if this thing works,” she said, “we’ll be a couple of kids and they’ll be looking for a couple of adults, is that it? I guess youth is the perfect disguise. I mean, lot’s of people change their appearance, maybe make themselves look older, but nobody can fake youth. Is that the deal?”

  “Well, something like that. The bottom line is that they’ll be looking for us in London, and the trail will end here. We can start our lives over anywhere, even back in the States. They’ll never think to look for a younger couple. We can have our lives back again. Better yet, we can even have our youth back again.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “OK?”

  “OK,” she repeated.

  Paul prepared the syringes and injected Sandi first, and then himself. They pulled down the covers and went to bed. It was mid-day London time, but they were both tired. They were fast asleep by the time Trace McKnight arrived at Heathrow. No-neck Mason was there waiting when the plane pulled up to the gate.

  ___

  A horn sounded on the street below and awakened Sandi from a restful sleep. She stretched her arms out over her head.

  “Ouch,” she winced, grabbing at the pain in her right shoulder. She massaged it gently and rolled over to look at Paul. Fear shot to the core of her soul as she saw the face of the old man lying next to her. With a shriek, she jumped out of bed and stared at him.

  Paul was awakened by Sandi’s cry. He peered up at her naked figure in the dimly lit room and smiled. “It’s nice to know you’ll still look that good in thirty years.”

  “Paul?” she said, as she studied his face. The loose wrinkled skin and sunken eyes belonged to the face of an old man, but the mustache and wavy brown hair was his, and the voice…it was a bit raspy, but unmistakably Paul’s. “My God, what happened to you?”

  “To me?” he laughed. “I wouldn’t talk, old girl.”

  Sandi looked down at her naked body. “Jesus! They’re down to my knees,” she said staring in disgust at her sagging breasts.

  “You wish,” Paul said, still laughing. In a rare moment of vanity, Sandi had once lamented that she was not more well-endowed in the bust line, but to Paul, her figure was just right.

  Sandi grabbed the blanket and pulled it off the bed, covering herself. “This is your Fountain of Youth?”

  “Step one,” he said. “This is why it’s so perfect. See, the chronobots – that’s what I call these de-aging nanobots – they first age all the cells in the body to a chronological age of roughly sixty-five, then reset them. The whole process takes about seventy-two hours.”

  “So I’m gonna look like this,” she rubbed at her sore shoulder again, “and feel like this for three days.”

  “Yup.”

  “Lovely. And tell me again why this is so perfect.”

  “Why, did you forget already? Oh, yeah. You’re probably just getting a little senile, now aren’t you dear?”

  “Cute. Just talk old man. I want to get dressed.”

  “All right, all right. Think about it. We’re going to waltz right out of here this morning. Even if those guys are down there in the lobby right now, they’ll never recognize us. If they so much a
s suspect it may be us, one close look and they’ll see this stuff isn’t make-up.” He tugged at the baggy skin on his neck.

  “In the lobby? How could they know we’re here? You don’t think you were followed, do you?”

  “I don’t think so, but these guys are professionals. Besides, like I said yesterday, I’m pretty sure they’ll find their way to Austin. Hell, if I know about his fake ID operation, you can bet your sweet ass they do too, and I doubt it’ll be very hard to get old Donny Austin to give them our new ID’s.”

  “Jesus, Paul. So they could be here right now?” she said, pulling the curtain aside just enough to see out the window.

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  “You really want them to find us? I thought you were just kidding when you said that.”

  “You don’t kid with these guys. Believe me, I don’t want them to find us, just the trail to London that we’ve left for them. See, when we walk out of here looking like this, they won’t recognize us even if they’re standing right next to us. Their search will come up empty and they’ll assume we’re hiding out somewhere in Europe.”

  “And won’t we be?”

  “Nope. Before we left Baltimore, I stopped by to see an old friend of mine. He spent a couple of years working with Austin. His work’s not quite as good as the old master, but good enough to pass through most security checkpoints, and nobody but a few close friends knows about this little hobby of his. See, he’s too timid to sell the stuff; he just does it for fun, but I was able to talk him into showing me how to make a blank set of documents. He set up the computer for me, and I put in the names myself. Even he doesn’t know the names I used, so if by some long shot they figure out that I went to him for help, they still won’t know what names we’re using. All I’ve got to do is insert the photos,” he pulled a digital camera out of his briefcase, “with this, and we’re all set. We walk out of here and fly anywhere we want. Three days from now, we’ll be a couple of teen-agers. We can be whomever we want and go wherever we want. Imagine being eighteen again, with all the money you’ll ever need, and armed with the knowledge that a couple of extra decades of life has forced into us.”