Mirrored Man: The Rob Tyler Chronicles Book 1

  “Oh, don't worry, Doc. Yer among friends.”

  Popping the lid off the bottle, Tiong dumped a few of the pills in his hand and looked around. “Well, that's good to know. I'd hate to be in the back of a truck, waking up from a chemically induced coma”—he glanced at his bicep—“having been drugged against my will, going who knows where with a guy who wasn't friendly. That would be tragic. I don't suppose that you have any water?” Before he finished speaking, he heard something sliding across the floor. A bottle of darkly colored Gatorade bounced off the mattress. “I only like the green kind.”

  The disembodied voice chuckled. “That stuff's better for ya 'n water.”

  “I guess it would be kind of pointless to ask if it's safe to drink.”

  “If we wuz gonna poison ya, we could’a done that while you wuz asleep. Don't worry, Doc. Where y’all are goin', they made it real clear they want you alive and healthy.”

  “Oh yeah, and where's that?”

  “To be honest, I don't know where y’all are gonna end up. But if I did, I'm perty sure they'd want me to keep it a surprise.”

  Tiong smiled. “You know, you said I was among friends and I have to admit that, although I've never been kidnapped before, you have to be the friendliest kidnapper in the state, if not the entire country. Really, if any of my friends ever wants to be kidnapped, I'm recommending you. Do you have a resume' or something I could take with me?” When he finished, his eyes, finally adjusting to the low light, came to rest on the man sitting on the floor about ten feet away leaning against one of four large crates stacked two high and marked “Caution: Live animals.” He was wearing blue jeans and a plaid button-down shirt. Lying on the floor next to him was some kind of long gun. A rifle or shotgun, Tiong guessed.

  “Aw, Doc. That stung just a little bit. I didn't kidnap ya. I'm just keepin' y’all company fer the ride. Are ya hungry? I've got some jerky and granola bars.”

  “No, thanks. Don't have much of an appetite just now.” Tiong looked around the trailer. He noticed what he thought was a pile of blankets in the corner, but upon closer inspection he saw a hand sticking out from under them. He started to crawl towards it and checked to see if his captor would object.

  “I hope he's okay. Don't know what they used on the little feller, but he hasn't moved since they put him there.”

  Tiong checked for a pulse as he pulled the blankets off of the unconscious form of Professor Yeoum Chi. Finding a strong, steady heartbeat, he breathed a sigh of relief. “How long have you had us in here?”

  “Tsk, tsk, now, Doc. You ask a lot of questions. Are you always like that?”

  “Only when I don't know things. I'm funny that way.”

  “Well, just relax. We got a long way to go. I got some cards and a checker board so we don't get too bored on the way.”

  “To where? Oh, I forgot, you don’t know.”

  Schultz shrugged. “They never said where they wuz takin’ y’all. I just know we’re droppin’ y’all off at the docks.”

  “The docks … as in a shipyard?”

  “Yup.”

  “What shipyard?”

  Schultz took a swig from his own bottle of Gatorade. “We're headin' to the sunshine state, Doc.”

  “Florida?”

  “Naw, California.”

  “That would be the golden state, Sarge.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. Why California?”

  “Shoot! That's a easy one,” Shultz laughed. “We're goin' to California 'cause that's where I'm gettin' paid.”

  * * * * *

  THE NEEDLE ON THE GAS gauge was floating between empty and the one-quarter full mark as the Torino passed the sign in the darkness that read “Apalachicola City Limits: Population 2,207.”

  Rob whispered the Lord's Prayer just loud enough for June to hear as he guided the car down the street. He had an eerie feeling of familiarity, seeing the sights and smelling the salty air. It brought back memories of his exploits in the Navy, as well as childhood vacations at the beach.

  Against June’s initial objection, they had decided it would be best to drop the dog off around the corner from the convenience store before they had resumed their trip. He could have been good company, and he may have been useful if they ran into any undesirables, but he had a family. They couldn’t take the kid’s car and his dog, too.

  The clock on the archaic instrument panel was broken, its hands stuck on 4:29, but by June’s reckoning, it was sometime after 11:00 p.m. She watched Rob scanning the town, a puzzled look on his face as they moved at a snail’s pace down Prado Street. Thankfully, the traffic was light, even for the tourist community on this summer evening.

  “Anything familiar?” she asked.

  “Everything's familiar. I just don't have any idea why.” The feeling in the pit of his stomach was guiding him, and nothing else. He could feel an approaching intersection beckoning him to turn north. He clicked the turn signal on.

  June remained silent as he turned on to 25th Street and proceeded nine more blocks, turning left onto Bluff Road. Rob’s eyes searched the signs above the businesses on the right side of the road, squinting to see in the low light. Before long he found what he was looking for and turned into the driveway.

  June read the sign. “Bluff Road Storage.”

  They came to a stop in front of a metal gate. Out the driver’s window was a small keypad on the wall with a sign that read “24 Hour Access. Input Your Pin Here.”

  “What’s your pin?” she asked.

  He gave her an uncomfortable smile. “I have no idea.”

  All at once, a series of numbers flashed into his head. He tapped them in, and to their amazement, they heard the sound of an electric motor as the gate slid open.

  The place was dark. There were some lights mounted to the metal structure, but most of them were broken or burnt out, making them dependent on the headlights of the Torino. They drove slowly in, taking note that the gate closed again once they were clear.

  “How did you—?” June started.

  He shrugged. “Look around for a flashlight.”

  “How did you know that code? Have you been here before?”

  Rob turned his attention to the numbers painted on the locker doors, not sure which one he was looking for. “Apparently.”

  They reached the end of the driveway and followed the building around to the right. June found a flashlight underneath the seat. She clicked the button and shined its light at the numbers over the doors as they passed them.

  Rob was getting frustrated. He had no idea how he knew the pin code to open the gate. He repeated the numbers over and over to himself, trying to find any significance to the combination, until he realized that there was a familiar pattern. He stomped on the break, bringing the car to a stop with a jarring jolt and looked into June's wide eyes.

  “Did you find the one that you're looking for?” She asked, just a bit unnerved.

  “Four, six, zero, two, four, zero.”

  “Huh?”

  “Zero, four, two, zero, six, four.” He said the numbers in reverse. “April twentieth, nineteen sixty-four! Holy cow. That's Carol’s birthday!”

  “Carol … your wife, Carol?”

  “Yup. I have been here before. But when?”

  “Are you getting your memory back?” she asked hopefully.

  He shook his head. “I don't know. On the road I was having flashes, images of things here in town. Buildings. Signs, like the one out front. But I can't make sense out of most of them.”

  “Any idea what unit you're looking for?”

  “Not a clue,” he answered as he inched the Ford forward.

  They completed another circuit, and then they rolled to a stop in front of unit number forty-eight. Rob shut off the lights, but left the car running. He climbed through the window with June following close behind. She was hoping for another keypad, but instead, hanging there on the latch was a heavy-duty combination lock.

  ?
??You must know it. Maybe it’s the same as the gate,” she said.

  Rob nodded and closed his eyes. To his dismay, no numbers came to him as before. He tried the same numbers that opened the gate, backward and forward, but to no avail. After a few more attempts, he shook his head. “Get the keys and see if there are any tools in the trunk.”

  June did as she was asked and opened the trunk. Inside were not one but four red toolboxes filled with all sorts of tools.

  “Oh, man,” she said.

  “What is it?” Rob asked, joining her as his eyes settled on a pair of three-foot-long bolt cutters.

  “I hope all of this gets back to the owner when they find the car,” June said, regretting even more her recent career change to assistant car thief.

  “I hope so, too,” he agreed. Stealing the car was necessary, but Rob still felt guilty. He made a silent vow to make it up to the young man if at all possible. He grabbed the heavy bolt cutters. Returning to the locker, he wrestled the tool in place and applied a fair amount of force. The lynch pin snapped, dropping the lock to the concrete. Rolling the door up, they peered in.

  The ten by twenty storage room was surprisingly empty. On the back wall were cases clearly labeled “MEALS READY TO EAT” and other durable foodstuffs piled up from floor to ceiling. In front of it were several large boxes filled with camping equipment and other items. In the middle of the floor sat a large leather-clad trunk and four suitcases. On the wall there was what appeared to be a map of some kind taped to the corrugated aluminum. Above, a string hung from the single light fixture in the ceiling.

  “Pull the door down, please,” Rob requested.

  June did as he asked and Rob tugged the string, illuminating the unit with the light of the bare bulb. He checked the suitcases first. Finding them unlocked, he unzipped one of the bags and flipped it open. Inside was an assortment of men’s clothing, all of them his size.

  June followed suit and opened one of the other cases. She found clothes belonging to a young girl. “Are these your daughter’s?”

  Rob didn’t look up, nor did he answer. He wasn’t ready to deal with that particular subject. He checked the bag for anything other than clothes and found a shaving kit, some packages of trail mix, a Bible, and a manila envelope containing several passports, all of different identities and nationalities but with his picture. His. June moved on to one of the other bags and found similar clothes to the first one she had opened, but for a boy about the same age. Rob opened the remaining bag and found women’s clothes. All four contained similar items to what Rot found in the first suitcase.

  “Why would you keep clothes for you and your family in a storage room four hundred miles from where you live?”

  “I guess I'm paranoid,” he said. He was becoming more and more convinced that she had told him the truth about his predicament. “Just in case I felt that my family was in danger and I needed to leave in a hurry, I’m assuming.” He eyed the trunk, already suspecting what he would find inside.

  “You remember?”

  “No. But I have … I had a locker like this one before. When I was stationed in Japan. But I don’t know why I would have put this one here.” He turned his attention to the children's bags. “Could you hand me the kids’ passports?”

  Hesitantly, June gave one of each over to him.

  He stared at them for a long time. If their dates of birth were correct and not a fabrication, they would be seven years old. It seemed odd that their U.S. passports were missing until he recalled that, while in Japan where he had retained a similar locker, he had kept his and Carol's legal documents at their residence. Easy access for short-notice travel. And, as with his own forged papers, each of the children's foreign passports had different names, further alienating them from his memory. “What are their names?”

  The sadness in his eyes was apparent and June could only imagine what he was feeling at that moment. “Christian and um … Caitlin Cecily. But you always called her C. C.”

  “Seven years old and I can’t remember them.”

  He held the passports there for another moment and then gently handed them back to June.

  “It’ll come back,” June said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  “They look like their mother, praise God for that.”

  “Amen,” she agreed with a grin, attempting to lighten the mood.

  Rob turned his attention to the trunk. Inside he saw exactly what he expected. Two Heckler & Koch MP5s, a favorite close-quarter weapon of the SEALs, two Beretta pistols, boxes of ammunition, a short-wave radio, and a box that Rob knew without opening it contained various medicines, first aid supplies, and water purification tablets. There was a pair of night-vision goggles, and tucked into a corner were two Luminox dive watches. The last item was a box that contained stacks of one hundred dollar bills that amounted to fifty thousand dollars.

  “Were you going to start your own coup? What’s all the cash for?”

  “Mad money. All of it’s for the unknown, my just-in-case stash.”

  “Looks to me like you were preparing for World War Three.”

  He turned to face her. “I was.”

  With their backs to each other, they changed out of their well-worn scrubs and into clothes from the suitcases. Luckily, Carol liked loose fitting items, but even at that June found them small. She found a pair of jeans with some stretch that she managed to get in to, though they were inches too short, and a royal blue cotton tee. As for the shoes, there was no way that she could she could fit them, so she was forced to keep on the slippers she had been wearing. Rob assured her that they would find some clothes for her in town.

  They unloaded the toolboxes from the trunk to make room for the supplies that Rob felt he would need, and then turned their attention to what they thought was a map taped to the wall. It turned out to be an aerial photograph of the local airport with all of the buildings and runways labeled. The third of five hangers at the south end had a star drawn on it and some writing that Rob recognized: 1966 DeHavilland DHC-2 MKIII Turbo Beaver.

  “That’s my writing.”

  “Is it some kind of a code?”

  Rob smiled. “No, it's an airplane.”

  “Well, that makes sense. We are looking at a picture of an airport.”

  “Actually, it's a float plane.” he said, not sure how he knew it.

  “A float plane?”

  “The kind of plane that you can land on the water.” He pulled the map of Florida from his back pocket.

  June's expression turned grim as the wheels in her head began to turn. They had been in such a rush to get to Apalachicola that she hadn’t considered what they would do once they got here. “What are you thinking?”

  Without taking his eyes off of the map he asked, “Are you hungry?”

  “What?” June cocked her head.

  “I'm starving. I feel like I haven't eaten in two days.”

  June thought about it. “We haven't.”

  “I could use some rest and a shower, too.”

  “Yeah, you really could,” she said, nodding as an exaggerated agreement.

  Rob smiled. “How 'bout we get something to eat and find a room for the night … with two beds … and get some rest. We can go at this again tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said apprehensively.

  “Look,” he said gesturing to the storage room. “We can hide the car in here.”

  “You didn't answer my question.”

  “I'm sorry. What was it again?”

  “What are you planning to do, Rob?” she asked, frustrated with his obvious attempt to dodge the question.

  “Did you ever see Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

  “Of course. Who on earth hasn't?”

  “Remember when they were in Cairo and they were trying to get the ark away from the Nazis after the plane blew up?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I'm doing what Indy did.”

  “What's that?”

  “Makin' it up as I go a
long.”

  26 No Honor Among Thieves

  2 August 2010

  0638 hours

  IT WAS THE NEXT morning before investigators were able to enter and explore the darkened facility under the convenience store. They found the diesel engines in the generator room still running, but the damage done to the conduit made it immediately evident that the complex had been compromised. Emergency lights had long since run out of juice, so the investigators were forced to inspect the pitch-black facility by flashlight until a team of electricians arrived to get the main power back online.

  Eddie was standing in the security office where the single body that remained in the facility was found. Jabrani was the young man’s name, Senior Airman Mike Jabrani. During the weeks he spent inside, Eddie had learned that Jabrani had dreams of joining the Air Force special operations command and its para-rescue unit. Their primary focus was to rescue downed pilots. Here was a young man whose one hope had been to serve his country by saving others, but his dreams and his life had been snuffed out in an instant.

  When they found the blast door in the tunnel standing open, Eddie’s fears had been confirmed. They had also found that all but three of the complex’s doors had been wedged open. The doors to Jimmy’s office and the two that led into the cloning chamber were still sealed. It was obvious that there was much more going on here than what happened out on the road.

  At least we didn’t find everyone dead. Surely whoever did this wouldn’t have carted all but one body out.

  He deduced that the assailants, whoever they were, had come for one of two reasons. Either some government agency had been monitoring the experiment with orders to act in the event of an incident, or some other entity had somehow learned of the project and was poised to take advantage of an opportunity to gain access to the facility, and its personnel and technology. In either case, he and everyone else who had been riding in the trailer were also targets.

  Did the truck crash simply provide a diversion with unintended and tragic consequences? Or was it the psychotic episode with Rob when they woke the clone? Could it all just be a case of bad timing?

  The bank of security monitors was dark. The hard drives of the computers that stored the digital images had all been removed. Any hope Eddie had of retrieving the imagery was lost.

  “God help us,” Talbot said as he entered. Seeing Jabrani’s body, he crossed himself. “How many people were down here?”