AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And then he heard about a rogue chemist, formerly working in the research lab of a big pharma company. Word had it that the chemist had come up with a formula for performance enhancers that didn’t wreck the heart and wasn’t addictive. He’d had a few operators drop dead of unexplained heart attacks with previous drugs. Often, though, they were in countries where the authorities weren’t too particular and where bodies disappeared. And he would give a bonus of $100K to the members of the team.
This drug wasn’t like that. It operated on different principles and used different pathways. The chemist—who lost his job with the big pharma company and came to work for the Sommers group—tried to explain it, but Sommers couldn’t follow and didn’t care. What he cared about was productivity and, man, it just shot through the roof.
The chemist kept tinkering, happy as a pig in slop. But one day his tinkering came back to bite everyone in the ass.
Sommers had a team operating in Congo. They were supposed to stop a team from a Belgian mining multinational who apparently had found a lithium mine. There was an American prospecting team in the area who wanted to get to the mine first, stake their claim. His men had orders to … stop the Belgian geologists. Any way they could.
There was a tight timeline, and a very nice bonus if they met it. Sommers gave the group the latest drug his chemist had nicknamed Greased Lightning, the GPS coordinates and instructions to hurry.
The men went nuts. Read the GPS coordinates wrong, came across an American research team of virologists, thought they were the Belgian geologists, and killed everyone.
It was Congo. Deep in the jungle. No one had to know. Except it turned out that during the massacre, an American satellite had filmed everything.
When Sommers heard the news, he knew he was in deepest shit. This wasn’t something that could be buried or bought. It was on tape.
His men had come directly from providing security to a Moroccan general and had been in full Sommers Group uniform, so there was no doubt who had perpetrated the massacre. Sommers frantically tried gaming escape hatches, but there weren’t any.
Then he remembered meeting a guy at one of the endless parties on the Washington circuit. A guy who worked at the NSO and who knew how to manipulate images.
It was a huge gamble, but Sommers had gambled before and come out on top. Turned out the guy at the NSO, a guy named Morris Sartan, was very receptive to money. Very. He was expensive, but he made the problem go away. The footage of his men attacking American scientists became footage of Chinese soldiers attacking American scientists.
Everyone knew the Chinese were everywhere in Africa. So a group of them went crazy—so what?
But it turned out that Chinese troops going nuts, attacking American scientists, even deep in the jungle, was a very big deal.
At least they didn’t know those troops were Sommers Group operators. The operators weren’t talking. The ‘wonder drug’ they’d used caused massive brain damage. It put half of them into a coma and turned the rest into drooling shells who couldn’t feed themselves or tie their own shoelaces. Something about affecting the neocortex, his scientist explained in technical terms, that Sommers didn’t follow.
Basically, one big whoopsie.
Sommers had just finished burying the last member of the team when his guy in the NSO, Sartan, called and said that some nosy interfering office drone named Henry Yu uncovered the deepfake. Yu had taken his findings to Sartan, who said he’d look into it and called in a strike team. Sommers sent his three best men and they took care of Yu. And then Sartan said that the person who actually uncovered the deepfake was a young woman. Riley Robinson.
Sommers sent his team after her, sure that a gunshot would take care of her like it took care of Yu. They’d staged it as a suicide. Lots of suicides this year at the NSO. Something in the water?
However, in the meantime, with the threat of a real shooting war on the horizon, Pentagon contracts started rolling in. He’d fallen into the shit and come out smelling like a rose. All he needed to do was get rid of one woman.
But somehow this young woman, a computer expert, a fucking lady nerd, evaded his men, ran into a car and disappeared.
Right now, the fortunes of Adrian Sommers and of the Sommers Group depended on this bitch not being alive. He had to find her. Eliminate her.
Had to.
Riley wasalive by a miracle and by the help of her best friends all the way across the continent. They guided her through the building while she was blind. Personal laptops were not allowed in the building. NSO laptops had transponders—she didn’t dare grab hers. She had to go on the run with only her cell which, thank God, she’d turned into a satphone that couldn’t be tracked.
Hope and Emma kept her informed every step of the way where the Sommers soldiers were, otherwise she would never have had a chance, particularly after the men split up. Once, a Sommers guy walked right by her, not five feet away. She had flattened herself inside a door niche in a cross corridor and he never noticed. Hope and Emma also kept her away from groups of people because you never knew.
Slowly, creeping down temporarily empty corridors, hiding in bathrooms, taking stairwells, she made her way to the ground floor.
Her heart beating wildly the entire time.
Hope and Emma also kept her informed on the man racing toward her to rescue her. Pierce Jordan. Good guy. Emma’s boyfriend’s best friend. Solid. Reliable. Skilled.
She needed that more than anything. She was solid and reliable and skilled too, and look where that got her. Running for her life.
No, this Pierce apparently was skilled in exotic things like sniping and urban warfare, and had even been undercover with terrorists for over a year. Cool under fire.
Yeah. She needed someone who could keep his cool because she was burning up with anxiety and terror.
Riley was very aware that she was sitting on a bomb. There were enormous interests in play. And she had proof of criminal activity on the part of one of the most powerful security companies on earth.
