The Prison Quest Page 2

  The corner of Joseph’s mouth gave the barest of flickers.

  A sudden thought struck Cody, and she put her hand on Joseph’s arm. “It’s not something between you and Sarah, is it? Did you two fall out? Because, if it is—”

  “No,” Joseph interrupted. “Sarah’s fine. It’s nothing like that.”

  “So what is it?”

  Joseph stopped suddenly, turning in a full circle, his eyes darting across the parked cars.

  “There’s no one here,” Cody said. “And I should know.”

  Joseph snorted. “There’s always someone watching.”

  Cody studied his expression. In a high-pressure workplace like Vortax, where priceless trade secrets were hidden behind every other door, there were plenty of paranoid conspiracy nuts among the employees. But Joseph wasn’t the twitchy type—not usually, anyway. Perhaps the strain is starting to get to him, Cody thought, and she softened her tone. “What’s going on, Joseph? Maybe I can help.” She hesitated. “Is someone causing you trouble? Are they giving you a hard time?” Cody’s hands turned to fists inside her pockets. Joseph was one of the good guys, and if someone was taking advantage of his gentle nature, Cody would track them down and put them straight. There were many ways to make a person see sense, but a quick punch to the solar plexus was one of Cody’s favorites.

  “You can’t help,” Joseph said. “No one can.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  Joseph shook his head. “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Come on,” Cody insisted. “We’re freezing our butts off out here. Why don’t you just tell me the problem, and then we can both go inside?”

  “No. It’s too late, anyway.”

  “Too late for what?” Cody paused to take a breath. “You know, if it’s something about your work, I won’t tell anybody. I would never leak secrets—I don’t want to risk going to jail. And anyway, even if you did tell me, I probably wouldn’t understand half of it.”

  Joseph looked her in the eye, and for a moment, Cody saw a glimmer of hope tinged with desperation. But then he turned, hurrying away. “Forget it, Cody,” he called over his shoulder. “Forget you saw me today.”

  Cody stood still, rooted to the spot. There was something in the way Joseph spoke, something final. She wanted to run after him, to get the truth out of him. But she remained where she was, watching in silence as Joseph reached the main entrance and stepped inside. The glass doors slid smoothly closed, and Cody was left standing in the cold, alone and utterly confused.

  CHAPTER 2

  As the last of the winter sunlight faded away, Cody watched the clock on her tablet, counting the remaining minutes of her shift, but the throaty growl of an engine made her look up. A matt black armored truck was nosing into the lot, the automated barrier rising to allow it through. From a distance, she took it to be one of the security trucks that arrived every day to shift valuable equipment or sensitive data, but when the truck swung smoothly across the parking lot, she narrowed her eyes. What the hell is that thing doing here?

  This was no security truck, but a BEAR—a tactical support vehicle favored by SWAT teams and the military—and it was turning up on Cody’s watch.

  Cody pocketed her tablet as she marched across the lot to intercept the vehicle, but the truck skirted the lot, grinding to a halt directly outside the main entrance. She jogged over to inspect the truck, but the cab was well above eye level and its windows were so heavily tinted it was impossible to see inside. Cody looked along the vehicle, surprised to see no badge or identifying marks, then she took out her tablet to check the delivery schedule. That’s weird. There were no pickups or deliveries expected for the rest of the day.

  She kept her eyes on the cab as she walked around to the front of the truck, holding up her tablet and activating her scanner, but for some reason, the scan wouldn’t run. Cody tried again, but when the truck’s passenger door swung open, she stepped back, ready for anything.

  The man clambering down from the cab wore a well-cut business suit over a dazzling white shirt. He would’ve looked more at home in a Bentley rather than a BEAR, but even so, he had the relaxed poise of someone accustomed to being in charge. He buttoned his jacket as he strolled toward her, and when he spoke, his voice was deep and commanding: “There’s no need to scan this vehicle. We’re authorized to be here.”

  Cody hesitated. “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t leave your vehicle in this area—it’s for emergency services only.”

  The man slid his hand inside his jacket and Cody tensed, but the man smiled as if amused at her reaction. “Relax,” he said. “I’m just getting my ID.” He held out a card bearing the Vortax logo, and when Cody read the man’s details, she stood to attention, her eyes fixed dead ahead.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel Banks, sir,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting anyone from V Division.”

  The colonel pocketed his card, looking Cody up and down. “That’s understood. You’re doing your job, and we’d appreciate it if you’d let us do ours.”

  “Of course, sir.” Cody’s mind raced. This could be a great opportunity, a chance to make a good impression on someone from V Div. But you couldn’t just soft-soap a colonel, could you? Cody cleared her throat. “If there’s anything I can do to help, Colonel, please let me know. In the meantime, I was wondering if I might—”

  Banks didn’t give her a chance to finish. “Thank you, but it’s best if you go about your business as usual. We’ll be out of here as soon as we can, and that’s all you’re authorized to know.”

  “Yes. I understand. Sorry to have kept you, Colonel.” Cody stood, waiting to be dismissed, but the colonel was already walking away, and he climbed back into the BEAR’s cab, slamming the door without a backward glance.

  Maybe I can catch him later, Cody thought, heading back across the parking lot. Her tablet buzzed in her pocket, and when she took it out, she saw the notification on the screen: a new message. Her mood brightened. Perhaps it was Joseph, getting in touch to apologize for earlier. But when she opened the message, her smile disappeared. It was from Chalmers. A few terse sentences:

  Milbourne - the guy on the next shift phoned in sick. You’d better cover for him. Stay put until I can find someone to take over. Don’t let me down.

  “Goddammit!” Cody muttered, but she clenched her jaw. She’d show Chalmers she could be relied upon, and then he’d take her seriously. He’d have no choice.

  ***

  Cody jogged across the snow-speckled asphalt, hugging herself to ward off the cold as she made for the Vortax building. She’d waited three hours before her replacement had finally come to take over. It was now almost eight o’clock, and Cody was starving.

  As she ran, her breath formed puffs of mist that curled up into the icy air until they were whipped away by the biting wind, but despite the cold, Cody smiled to herself. The working day was over at last, and she’d had plenty of time to figure out a plan for the evening.

  She stopped to scrape the worst of the snow from her boots, then she marched in through the glass doors and made her way across the lobby, her wet boots squeaking against the pristine marble floor. She took out her tablet, her fingers blurring across the screen as she placed a call, then she held it to her ear, waiting.

  Her call rang a few times then went to voicemail: “Hello, this is Joseph Salter. Sorry, but I can’t answer right now. Leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

  Cody frowned. Joseph was practically attached to his phone, so why wasn’t he picking up her call? Pushing her frustration aside, she said, “Joseph, it’s Cody. I’m out of here, but I’m going to call in at that pizza place you like—Roberta’s. I was hoping you could join me, at least for a quick beer.” She hesitated. Perhaps Joseph was elbow-deep in an experiment. That would explain why he’s working so late, she thought. Maybe I can persuade him to take a break. It’ll do him good. “Listen, Joseph,” she went on, “I’m headed up to your lab right now, then we’re going for the biggest pizza you ever saw, and you’re coming with me whether you like it or not.”

  She pressed the disconnect icon. Roberta’s was only a ten-minute walk away, and if Joseph really wanted to, he could always go back to work after he’d eaten. But she hoped she wouldn’t have to wait too long for him. She could almost taste the spicy sausage and sweet red peppers mingling with the molten mozzarella.

  Cody hurried to the nearest elevator, stepping inside and hitting the button for level three. The journey took only seconds, and then she was striding along the corridor on level three, navigating the maze-like level until she came to a steel door labeled: Research Suite - Authorized Personnel Only.

  The research suite’s mundane title gave no clue as to its real importance. Here, some of the world’s finest minds worked together to create technologies that would one day change the lives of almost everyone on the planet. Cody loved the vibrant atmosphere in the place: so much energy, so much drive. Anyone with half a brain could see these men and women were going places, and with the might of the Vortax Corporation behind them, nothing could stand in their way.

  Very few people got to see beyond this door, but as a member of the personal security team, Cody had access. Most employees had to press their badges against the panel next to the door and then wait while a retinal scan completed. But not Cody. Some time ago, she’d helped Joseph out by volunteering as a test subject for a biochip system he’d been working on. A tiny device had been implanted under the skin on the back of her right hand, its chip loaded with a complete set of biometric data. She’d been a little worried about her privacy, but Joseph had reassured her, and she’d been happy to go along with it. The device had given her no problems whatsoever, and it granted her instant access to certain secure areas of the building, bypassing the tedious biometric scans.

  She took hold of the door handle, and a faint metallic click let her know the lock had disengaged. Cody entered the long and brightly lit corridor beyond, then she hurried to Joseph’s lab. She hesitated before going inside, remembering the way Joseph had walked away from her earlier, but Joseph wasn’t just a company asset to her, he was a friend. And Cody never turned her back on a friend.

  She pushed the door, stepping inside but seeing no one. “Joseph?”

  Tall racks of servers lined the walls of the large laboratory, and twelve long lab benches ranged down the center of the room, all covered with the paraphernalia of Joseph’s mysterious craft: twisted bundles of multi-colored ribbon cables, stacks of circuit boards, and rows of black metal boxes that boasted impressive arrays of blinking LEDs.

  Cody weaved between the benches, stepping carefully over the tangled mess of power cords trailing across the floor, and making sure she didn’t touch anything. “Joseph, are you in here?”

  She frowned. Joseph was the most goal-oriented person she had ever met; when he was in the building, he was in his lab, hard at work. He had to be somewhere nearby. She ran through the possibilities in her mind. Joseph had seemed off, but there could be a simple explanation. Perhaps he’d caught the nasty flu bug going around. He might’ve been feeling sick and then headed for home, somehow slipping past her as he’d hurried away.

  There was one easy way to find out. Cody pulled out her tablet, calling Joseph’s number, and a shrill ringtone shattered the silence in the lab.

  “Joseph?”

  Cody forced down the surge of anxiety stirring in her stomach, and the ringtone cut off as Joseph’s voicemail took the call. She called again, following the sound of the ringtone, but she had to call twice more before she tracked it down. The sound seemed to be coming from beneath a bench, so she got down on her hands and knees to reach beneath the storage units. At first, she found nothing, but then her hand brushed against smooth plastic and she closed her fingers around the phone’s familiar shape and slid it across the floor. The phone was definitely Joseph’s; he’d kept the same old model for years, refusing to upgrade and telling everyone who’d listen that it was the most reliable handset ever built. But this phone hadn’t just been dropped on the floor; the case was badly cracked with one corner missing completely, and a long, jagged split ran the length of the screen. It looked as though someone had deliberately attempted to destroy it.

  “What the hell?” Cody stood slowly and swiped the phone’s screen. She wasn’t expecting it to work properly after the beating it had taken, but the screen burst into life. Looks like he was right to trust this old thing after all. The phone wasn’t locked, and when Cody checked the notifications, a list of missed calls flashed across the screen. There were several calls from her, but more worrying were the missed calls from Joseph’s wife; there were five of them, and all made over the last few hours.

  Cody turned in a slow circle, scanning the room. Joseph would never have damaged his own phone deliberately, and he certainly wouldn’t ignore calls from his wife. What happened here? And where the hell is Joseph?

  Her gaze fell on the door at the far end of the lab. When she’d been assigned to Joseph, she’d spent many hours in his lab, but she’d never been through that door; she’d never even seen it open. She’d asked Joseph about it once, but he’d told her it was just a server room. Perhaps Joseph was inside. Some of the server rooms had very noisy cooling systems, and that would explain why Joseph hadn’t heard her. Yes. That made perfect sense.

  Cody strode across the lab, her gaze fixed on the server room door. The handle turned beneath her hand, but when she pushed on the door it remained firmly shut. Cody pressed her ear against the door, detecting the hum of cooling fans. But that wasn’t all. A metallic tapping sound, faint but insistent, repeated over and over, and she stood back, a chill prickling the back of her neck. Something wasn’t right.

  She raised her fist, hammering on the door. “Joseph! Are you all right?” No response. She hammered again, harder. “Joseph! Shout if you can hear me. Say something!”

  Silence.

  Cody slammed her shoulder against the door, and a wave of white-hot pain shot through her arm, but the door didn’t budge. She stepped back, set her stance and kicked hard just below the door’s handle. She felt something give, and when she pushed the door, it opened, a rush of chilled air washing over her, the whir of cooling fans filling the lab. Beyond the doorway, the room was almost dark, lit only by the dim glow of a row of blue and green LEDs. She could see no sign of life among the eerie shadows, but there was that tapping noise again: louder, more urgent.

  “Joseph, are you in there?”

  Cody stepped into the doorway, but she kept her hand on the door. “Joseph? It’s me, Cody. Are you in here?”

  There was no reply. She took a step into the room, and above her, the ceiling lights flared, flooding the small room with dazzling, white light. Cody raised her hand to shield her eyes. As she moved, something snagged against her feet, and she threw her arm out, grabbing hold of the door frame to keep her balance. She looked down, kicking her feet free from the untidy tangle of wiring that had threatened to trip her, then she squinted against the glare to examine the room.

  Coiled cables snaked across the floor, gathered together in thick bundles running the length of the room. And when Cody lifted her gaze to see where the cables led, she gasped.

  A series of strange devices, like sleek black coffins with rounded corners, were arranged in two neat rows. Cody counted ten in total, and she stared in disbelief at the hundreds of wires and pipes that ran from the casket-like enclosures to the dark metal server cabinets behind them, where scores of tiny lights flickered and flashed. At the far end of the room, the entire wall was given over to a massive screen that streamed with numbers, charts, and codes that Cody had no hope of understanding.

  She took a hesitant step forward, and when she ran her eyes along the forbidding rows of dark apparatus, a knot of pure fear pulled itself tight in the pit of her stomach.

  The black caskets stood open, their glass lids propped upright. Except for one.

  Cody stared at the sealed casket, and that was when she discovered the source of the tapping sound. On the floor beside the casket, something had fallen onto the metal grating of an air vent, and the powerful stream of chilled air blasting upward tossed the object from side to side, rattling it against the grating’s metal bars, over and over again. A shoe.

  Cody blinked. The old-fashioned, brown brogue could belong to only one person. Oh my God! Cody dashed to the closed casket, stumbling over the twisted cables as she ran. She laid her hands on the casket’s lid, peering down through the frosted glass.

  “No!” Cody yelled, her blood turning to ice in her veins. “Joseph!”

  Her friend lay inside the casket, unmoving. His eyes were open, staring into space, but he didn’t respond when Cody called his name, and his fixed gaze didn’t even flicker when Cody pressed her face to the glass.

  She clawed at the lid, scrabbling with her fingernails for a grip on its smooth surface, but there was no exposed seam, nothing to hold on to. She pushed and pulled, but the lid didn’t so much as move a thousandth of an inch. Cody slammed her closed fist down onto the glass, earning nothing except a jarring burst of agony that shot through her wrist. She glared at the casket. There had to be a way to get Joseph free, some way of releasing the lid before it was too late.

  Cody looked frantically along the side of the casket, running her hands along the smooth black metal, and as if sensing her touch, a small panel lit up on the casket’s side, a circular red icon glowing bright. She slammed her palm against the panel, and the casket emitted a raucous, two-toned siren. Cody hesitated, but the siren cut off as abruptly as it had begun, and from somewhere within the casket came the dull drone of motors whirring into motion. With a muffled sigh, the glass lid lifted a fraction of an inch, and the casket hissed as a mist of icy vapor poured out through the narrow opening. The whir of motors grew louder, and the lid swung upward until it was fully upright.