CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #2
“Well, that’s all right,” Jayce replied. “We’re inside now. That’s half the battle. All you need to do is keep watch and make sure no one kills me. Maybe also calm the dogs down if they start freaking out? You know how to do that, right?”
There was no magic technique that would calm an anxious dog down, especially a pack of anxious dogs locked in cages during a stressful situation. David didn’t think there was anything to be gained by telling Jayce that, though, so he just nodded and said, “Sure. I can do that.”
Jayce led David down the long corridor they had entered. David tried not to think about panicked dogs barking and drawing everyone’s attention to them.
Deeper in the facility, they could hear voices carrying. David’s heart thudded as they looked for a computer terminal Jayce could crack into. If they were discovered, it was over. They had no prayer of fighting their way out of this even if they wanted to.
Too late to turn back, he reminded himself.
As they neared a corner, David caught shadows coming from the intersecting hallway.
He froze, unsure what to do, and Jayce grabbed him and pulled him into a room.
He closed the door carefully and just as carefully released the latch.
It engaged with the gentlest of clicks, but David still heard a voice call, “What’s that? ”
He winced. Then his eyes widened in alarm as Jayce placed a hand on the pistol in his shoulder holster.
The analyst’s face was grim and hard, something David hadn’t seen before.
Once more, he realized just how out of his depth he was.
He couldn’t shoot someone! He couldn’t kill another human being in cold blood like that! If it came to that…
The shadows passed by the door. A brief glimpse of a helmeted guard flashed across David’s eyes. Then the footsteps receded.
Jayce relaxed his hand and pulled it away from his weapon. The hard look vanished, and he smiled at David. “Whew. That was a close one.”
David swallowed and nodded.
Something whispered behind him, a gentle scraping sound, like claws sliding across tile.
His heart dropped to his feet. He turned around, and a chill ran through his body.
The dogs were here. All of them. Fifty pairs of glowing eyes stared at the two men, the bodies containing them still and silent.
David felt a flash of relief when he saw the dogs were all restrained within cages.
He wasn’t proud of that thought, but he couldn’t be sure the dogs weren’t under the control of the CIA.
They had even less chance against fifty combat-ready dogs than they did against the human guards.
They made no noise, only watched the two men silently.
In one way, that was a relief, since it meant they weren’t alerting security to their presence.
In another way, it was disconcerting to see how much their natural instincts had been suppressed.
David wondered if these dogs could ever come back from their conditioning, or if they would have to spend the rest of their days on some ranch somewhere, drifting through life until age took them.
Still better than what the 93rd’s doing.
“Oh, thank God,” Jayce said.
He jogged to a computer terminal on the other side of the room. “Okay,” he said. “Give me ten minutes, and I’ll have everything we need.”
David nodded, still too disconcerted by the dogs to answer.
He walked through the room, looking left and right at the dogs.
They were stacked two cages high, two rows to a side, twelve cages in each row.
That accounted for forty-eight dogs, plus two more kept in individual cages on the far end of the housing unit, one on either side of the desk where Jayce was working. Fifty in total.
They followed David as he moved, eyes laser-focused on him, not so much as a pant escaping any of their mouths.
They were mostly big working dogs: German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Dobermann Pincers, a few Pit Bull Terriers and Huskies.
A few, however, were small breeds. Lapdogs.
A Pekingese that couldn’t have weighed more than eleven pounds looked up at David, its flat face oddly serious as it regarded him.
A Pomeranian even smaller than the Peke licked its lips, the only movement any of the dogs made other than to follow David as he moved.
He didn’t want to think about what a telepathically controlled small dog might be used for. They’d be pointless in a fight, but someone could strap a bomb to one of them and telepathically order it to hop onto some politician’s lap.
Would they do that? Would they go through all the trouble to create a telepathic small dog just to use it as a one-time assassination weapon?
Sure, they would. If this process was perfected, the CIA would turn the 93rd into a factory popping out dogs by the dozen to use for its nefarious plots. After all, these were just animals to them. Just tools.
Not to mention all the people who would die. The evil was just too much for David to wrap his head around. What a sheltered world he’d lived in before now.
He heard a soft scratching noise coming from a cage behind him. He turned around, and his eyes widened when he saw a beautiful honey-colored German Shepherd stepping to the door of her cage. Her eyes met David’s, and a flicker of recognition crossed them.
“Sierra,” David whispered.
He looked up and realized that the cages had the dog’s designations stamped above the doors on flat metal plates that superficially resembled dog tags.
Sure enough, this was Asset Sierra-9, the dog whose scars and traumatized behavior had first alerted him to the fact that something untoward was going on.
Tears welled in his eyes as he reached through the cage and stroked Sierrea behind her ears.
Her eyes closed, and a soft whine escaped her lips.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” David said. “All of you.”
He sniffed and reached for the latch to her gate.
“Okay,” Jayce said. “That’s everything. We take this to the FBI, and we’ll have enough to get the project shut down and get Chastain arrest… David, what are you doing?”
“I’m letting them out,” David said, closing his fingers around the latch.
“No!” Jayce cried. The chair scratched along the floor as he pushed himself out of it.
“I have to,” David said. “I can’t leave them here.”
He pressed the latch, disengaging the two hooks at the top and bottom that held the door closed. He opened the door, and Sierra stepped out.
Jayce hit him like a freight train, shoving him to the ground. Sierra bared her teeth and bunched her shoulders, ready to leap at Jayce.
Then an alarm klaxon wailed. Red lights strobed through the room, and David understood why Jayce had tried to stop him.
When he opened Sierra’s door, he set off an alarm. Their escape was ruined now.
The enemy was coming for them.