Hunting Nora Stone Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Colin Weldon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Colin Weldon

  Dublin Ireland

  www.colinweldon.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Hunting Nora Stone/ Colin Weldon. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN-10: 1975773772

  ISBN-13:978-1975773779

  (print)

  To Robyn, Nathan and Weldon

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bukit Duri, Jakarta

  August 1, 2015

  23:17 WIB

  The flame flickered as Nora Stone placed the candle on the broken floorboards. With no furniture or carpeting to absorb the hollow noise, it reminded her that she was very much alone, at least for the next few minutes anyway. She looked around the empty shack and tried to work out how much time she had left before they arrived. She knelt down and crossed her legs in front of her, placing the palms of her hands on her knees, facing upwards. She took in a slow controlled breath. Her cochlear implants picked up a nest of Collared Kingfisher birds, settling in for the night about a quarter mile to the east of the shack. She listened to the light flapping of wings as they tapped the tree bark. This was her fourth night here. The longest she had spent in any one place in more than three months. She needed the extra day to heal her ankle after the last attack. It should never have happened. She was careless, but she had learned from the mistake. She promised herself that it would not happen again. She rolled her head from side to side and stretched her shoulders back to loosen up her muscles. In the distance she could hear the faint sounds of tires on the dusty road about a mile out. The sound dissipated and suddenly stopped.

  One mile out. She probably had eight minutes, maybe ten if they were carrying more weaponry this time. This would be different. They needed to be stopped. She unzipped the black hooded top she had been wearing, folded it, and laid it neatly beside her on the ground. The white vest tank top underneath followed the contours of every highly toned muscle on her chest and stomach. She returned her hands to her knees and looked at them. She let her eyes drift along the transparent polymers that encased her forearms and up towards her shoulders, where both of her replaced limbs stopped and the real flesh began. Millions of neural connections intertwined through the circuitry and metallic “bone” structure, sending tiny pulses of light down the length of both arms and back to her spine. She closed her eyes and let her surroundings seep into her mind. She heard the flapping of the torn tarp outside the rear window, which looked onto a fast flowing river. She heard the sounds of the rats under the floorboards as they scavenged for food. They would have more than enough shortly. Somewhere in the distance, a single gun shot. It did not concern her. The sound of gunfire was an all too common occurrence. A fact that would probably prevent the proper authorities from reacting to what was about to happen here for several days, if ever. Not that it would matter. She would be long gone in the next half hour.

  A light, cracking sound caught her attention. She looked out at the front facing window. It was too dark to see anything at this time of night. She remained still. There was a kill team out there. They were quicker than expected. She faced forward and bowed her head, closing her eyes and taking a deep soothing inhalation. She made sure to keep her eyes shut until the effects of the inevitable flash grenade had faded. The glass at the front of the shack shattered as the first volley arrived. She raised her hands and covered her ears against the explosion and white light of the grenade. Then they came. Through the windows from the front and rear. Smashing their way in, their usual clumsy assault. No finesse. No thought. Just loud and aggressive. She opened her eyes to find herself surrounded on all sides by men in black combat gear and helmets. Their faces covered by the coward’s mask. The thick smoky air surrounded them as they pointed their laser-mounted rifles at her chest.

  “Don’t move!” shouted one of them.

  She counted five in all, with more on the way in the vehicle that had pulled up. Probably another four. Back up that they would surely need in a few seconds. She took a moment to choose her first target. He was standing all wrong with his weight on his left leg. He would be easy. She wondered who they were. Wondered if they had families who would miss them. She didn’t care.

  “Good evening gentlemen,” she said in a quiet civil tone, “shall we begin?”

  CIA Headquarters - Jaguar division

  Langley - Virginia

  August 5th 2015

  05:00

  Eddie Conrad looked down the firing range at the black target. It was the best time of the day to be here. No other distractions and no other agents to stare at him. He had felt their pitying eyes on the back of his head when he had walked the halls, the whispers of what had happened bouncing off the office walls. The ghosts of his former teammates following him wherever he went. He gently took the Glock 22 from his holster and removed the clip. He pulled back the slide and made sure the chamber was empty before placing the magazine back in. He cocked it once before laying the gun on the shelf in front of him. He then slid his ear cans over his head and picked up the gun, raising it to eye level. He looked at the target then back to his hands. They were shaking.

  “Fuck,” he said to himself, lowering the weapon and closing his eyes.

  He blew a slow controlled breath out of his mouth and rolled his shoulders before looking around him to make sure there was nobody there. It was only in the mornings that this happened. Abigail had told him the shakes would stop, eventually. He cleared his mind from the horrible thoughts that fought to break his concentration and tried to ground himself in the present moment. He pressed his thumbs against his forefingers and took another breath. He had originally thought the meditative idea was bullshit, but had found it surprisingly effective. He felt the weight of the weapon in his hand, thought about the bullets in the air, the fluid motion of raising his arms and firing. The only two things in the world right now were himself and the target. The distant screams of his friend somewhere in the recesses of his memory were still there of course. They would never go away, but right now he had a job to do. He took a deep breath, opened his eyes, raised the gun and fired continuously until the clip was empty. He waited, still in an offensive position, his hand steady
as a rock and looked at the small wisps of smoke as they filtered through the barrel. Then he lowered the gun and pressed the recall button on the target mechanism. It came to a stop in front of him, flapping slightly. Pulling his ear cans off his head, he checked his hits. There were fifteen holes. All in the head. All dead centre. His felt a vibrating sensation in his left pocked and pulled out a cell phone.

  “Conrad,” he said.

  “Report to Director Wise’s office in three hours,” came the male voice on the other end.

  “Understood,” Eddie said still looking at his target.

  His right hand began to shake.

  Office of DR ABIGAIL CARROL

  CIA Jaguar Division

  05:17

  Dr Abigail Carroll paid close attention to the screen. The overhead shot of the children showed them completing the last of their spatial reasoning tests. There were four rows sitting five abreast working through the problems. She removed the pen she was chewing and picked up the voice recorder and entered the encryption key in the specially modified device. Only she, and Director Wise knew the cypher key. She pulled a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear and pulled the recorder up to her lips.

  “Dr Carroll, field observations September 30th,” she said, “spatial recognition in its third hour, Apollo is showing signs of decreased performance since the surgery. Initial figures heading for 11-12% which is more than was expected.”

  She clicked off the recorder and focused in on the girl. She was sitting quietly in at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Abigail leant into the monitor. She pressed the record button.

  “Artemis is still outperforming the others by a factor of two. The neurological stimulators have had a profound impact on her cognitive processing. I recommend a physical assessment with the upgraded implants as soon as possible.”

  She clicked off the recorder and placed it on the desk. She leant back in her chair and stared at the young girl, rubbing the bridge of her nose. It had been several nights since she last slept. Wise was putting increased pressure on her to complete the observations by the end of the week. Her request to actually visit the facility had been turned down, again. This was not the kind of psychology she had wanted to practice when she had signed up. Her thirty-second birthday had been spent in this room only a week prior. There were no cards, no flowers. She had gotten a text message from her sister in Huston but it had been quickly erased by Jaguar IT and verbally given to her by some low-level analyst.

  Unauthorised personal communication was strictly prohibited and every call and message were logged and filtered before it ever got to her. She was alone. Purposefully isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. Not that she could blame them. What she was working on was classified black, well above top secret. She had not minded either. Her ‘public time’ as Wise had called it, counselling soldiers with an array of psychological problems, was so that he could at least show on the books that she had a real world use to the Jaguar program, but it was down here, down in the basement, where her real work began. She opened the folder on her desk labelled “TARSIS” and scanned through some of the details of her latest tests. She picked up her recorder again.

  “Project Tarsis showing signs of regression, responses to memory related stimuli is still too high in my opinion. Recommend more tests to avoid conflicts with memory and technological integration,” she said clicking off the recorder. She paused for a moment, a thought occurring to her. She clicked record again.

  “Note to self, pull the old Nora Stone assessments out the next time you’re in the archive,” she said placing the recorder back on the desk.

  She pushed her head lightly to fight a stiff neck setting in. Her morning 5k run had been intense and she had forgotten to stretch after. She took a glass of water on the desk and took a sip letting her eyes flick back up to the screen. The children were still working on the problems, all but one. Artemis, the young girl in question, suddenly tilted up and looked at the camera above her head, her eyes piercing through the screen. Abigail leant forward and looked at the pretty young face. After a few moments, Artemis returned her gaze forwards and placed her arms, or rather what they had replaced her arms with, on the desk. Abigail stared at her. While she had often wondered what it would have been like to have a child of her own, nature had decided otherwise. The furthering of her family gene pool would not come from her. That was a certainty. There was no escaping the bitterness of it. She had been cheated so she had excelled in her work rising through the intelligence community with a fervent ruthlessness. She was not without compassion. She had wanted to do good work for those that had seen battle but the Jaguar program had offered her something more, a chance to play God. To show God that if he would not let nature create than she would do it herself. It was the chance to create minds. New minds. Artificial ones. Far superior. Minds that could be deployed in battle without the inevitable scarring that destroyed them when they came home. The phone on her desk began to ring taking her away from the screen. She placed her glass on the table and answered it.

  “Dr Carroll here, yes Director Wise, I’ll be there right away,” she said.

  She gathered her files into an electronically sealed briefcase and turned off the monitor.

  “Good work,” she said to the blank screen before making her way outside towards the lift.

  Cyber Intelligence – Jaguar Division

  06:00

  Hiran Sripada scanned through the lines of code, oblivious to his co-workers standing over his shoulder watching him. He had broken through the last firewall and was currently trying to plant a root command into the mainframe of the KGB defence systems. Nothing major. Just a little ‘fuck you’ from the USA to make them think twice about hacking into their databases for a few weeks. It had been trickier than usual this morning. They were getting good. There was a new quantum string, which he had never seen before but he managed to bypass it. It had meant giving up some of his stolen ISP’s. Not that it would matter. The message he was sending was meant to be obvious.

  “You got it, man,” came a voice from behind him.

  He looked at him, startled for a moment. He looked at the usual bafflement of his co-workers as they tried desperately to keep up with him. Never, he thought to himself. He turned his attention back to the screen as a warning light went off telling him his hack had been detected. The assholes had distracted him. He thought quickly and entered his message. ‘A MAN IN THIS WORLD WITHOUT LEARNING IS AS A BEAST OF THE FIELD’ he wrote in the line of code. He pulled the plug on the hack and wiped the database before closing down his laptop to a round of applause and laughter. The door to the cyber intelligence room opened and Eddie Conrad entered. The workers scattered, mumbling under their breaths. Hiran turned around to face his cubicle and began to shuffle papers as Eddie approached. He could feel him standing behind him. He swivelled his chair back around to face him.

  “Do I want to know what you were doing?” Eddie said, his arms crossed.

  “Just a little housekeeping Sir, some fun with the boys,” Hiran said clearing his throat.

  “Fucking around with the KGB again Hiran?” Eddie said.

  “Me? No Sir,” Hiran said grabbing a yellow ball with a smiley face on it and squeezing it.

  “Right, because you know that if I find you’re fucking with the KGB I’ll have you working for a call centre in the Artic,” Eddie said.

  “Yes Sir, absolutely,” Hiran said.

  “Hmm,” Eddie said, “we lost contact with one of our drones over Bagdad last night, only for a few seconds but I want you to pull its code and figure out what went wrong. I have a meeting now with brass but I want a full report by the time I get back.”

  “Absolutely Sir, I’ll get right on it,” Hiran said.

  Eddie looked up at the long chain dangling off the back of Hiran’s cubical. Hiran followed his gaze.

  “What is that?” Eddie asked.
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  “That?” Hiran said pulling of the chain and displaying the gold trident looking symbol attached to it, “that is Trishul, the main weapon of Lord Shiva, it was used to sever the head of Ganesh. As a digital warrior, it brings me luck.”

  “Ok then,” Eddie said sounding unconvinced as he turned his back and walked away from him. Hiran watched as he made his way out of the room before taking a long breath. He placed the chain back on the wall of his cubicle and smiled as he caught a glimpse of himself in his monitor.

  “A warrior,” he whispered.

  Office of Director Benjamin Wise

  CIA Jaguar Division

  06:11

  “He’s not ready,” said Abigail as she stood in front of the large oak desk. Director Benjamin Wise leaned back in his high backed leather chair and ran his fingers through his dark hair. At sixty, he had clearly neglected his weight over the years and had no desire or will to rectify that situation any time soon. The heart disease gnawing away at his arteries simply reminded him that he had lived a full and enriched life. He looked at the attractive psychiatrist whose long brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her dark suit hid a woman who looked after her physical condition and while Wise knew never to shit where he ate, it was hard not to be attracted to such a woman. Also, he knew that she cared about only one thing. A ruthless and ambitious woman who would step on his neck to get ahead. But for now, in her current position, she was still loyal to him. Loyal to the Jaguar program in the basement. He leaned forward.

  “He’s been on the range every morning for the last three months. From what I hear, he appears to be very much ready,” Wise said removing his glasses and placing them on the desk.

  “He’s been out of the field for over two years Director. His PTSD will resurface to an incapacitating degree and in my professional opinion could cost him his life and that of any team that you assign him. Especially with the given target,” Abigail said crossing her arms.