Bloodline (Sigma Force 8)

“Before that,” Gray started, “about Amanda …”

Alden winked at him. “I heard she died here. A real tragedy.” So the good captain had already perceived, as Painter had, that Amanda’s best chance of survival lay in everyone continuing to believe that lie. “That’s what I’ll be reporting to my superiors.”

“Thank you,” Gray said and shook the man’s hand, grasping his forearm with the other.

“No thanks needed, mate. If it wasn’t for your quick thinking, there would’ve been more casualties at that UNICEF camp, including possibly my own men.”

With matters settled, Gray drew his group together and hurried toward the idling chopper. He wanted to be out of here before the SEALs clamped things down. The SEAL team was under orders to retrieve the charred body, to return the supposed remains of the president’s daughter back to the States—not a duty he would wish on anyone.

He called Painter again, reported what he’d learned, and coordinated logistics on their next move.

“We’re pulling up stakes here,” Gray said. “Any intelligence Kat can gather while we’re en route would help us hit the ground running once we’re wheels-down in Dubai City.”

“Understood. I’ll put a team on it. But I’ve got Kat working another angle.”

Gray paused as everyone loaded into the helicopter. Tucker lifted his dog. “What other angle?”

As Painter explained his worry that all of this bloodshed and terror somehow involved Amanda’s unborn child, Gray pictured the brutality of the cesarean performed on the anonymous woman, her body charred beyond recognition.

In his gut, Gray knew the director was correct.

This was all about the baby.

As he signed off and strapped into his seat aboard the chopper, another concern nagged him. It also centered on Amanda and her child. Gray couldn’t escape the sense that Painter had been withholding something from him. The director’s decision to keep Amanda’s survival a secret from her own parents never sat right with him. Painter was certainly a master chess player and could be coldhearted and tough when he had his back against the wall—but never this callous. His explanation felt forced, like there was something he didn’t want to share about Amanda or her family.

But what could it be?

With a roar of its engines, the helicopter slowly rose from the ruins of the camp, stirring smoke and ash, leaving the horrors below.

He might not know what gambit Painter was playing—but he knew one thing for certain.

This was just the beginning.

Much worse was still to come.

11:00 A.M. EST

Washington, DC

Robert Gant stepped through the air lock and entered the Class 1000 clean room, a stark white chamber with glass walls that looked out into the rest of the genomics lab. Staffed only by three researchers, the entire facility lay in an industrial area on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia, and was listed as a private DNA test lab.

But that was not its purpose.

Its true function had been etched into one of the glass walls of the clean room: a frosted cross, decorated with spirals of DNA along its crosspieces.

“Show me,” he said, using the deep baritone that served him well in the past as a U.S. ambassador and now as secretary of state.

He allowed some of his irritation to ring out. He’d left Jimmy and Teresa to their grief to attend to private family business, but he wanted to keep this visit as short as possible.

The researcher, Dr. Emmet Fielding—decked out in white coveralls, gloves, boots, and hood—drew him to a laboratory table. A sealed crystal cylinder, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, held a murky aquamarine fluid. Beside it on the table rested a titanium sculpture that looked like a clawless crab supported by six articulated legs. Its flat metal carapace measured a foot across, reminding Robert of the land mines that still peppered Southeast Asia, where he’d spent the bulk of his ambassadorship.

Fielding lifted the cylinder from the table and held it in the palm of his hand. “This is the latest generation,” he said proudly. “Half a million neurons harvested from human fetal cortical tissue to form this new brain. And, once implanted, it will communicate via five thousand micro-electrodes. A fourfold improvement from the last generation.”

And a huge advance from where this all started.

This was Robert’s pet project. He had learned of the first tentative steps taken by the University of Reading in England back in 2009. A researcher in neuro-robotics discovered that a handful of neurons, collected from the cortex of lab rats and grown in a culture medium, could be wired into a small wheeled robot, and through electrode stimulation, it could control and operate the tiny vehicle, learning over time as new synapses formed to avoid objects and work through mazes. Shortly thereafter, another scientist, at the University of Florida, upped the ante, wiring twenty-five thousand rat neurons to a flight simulator. Over time that tiny brain learned to fly a jet flawlessly through mountains and thunderstorms.

Years later, utilizing the family’s financial and technological resources, Robert had moved that bar much higher. Initially, the research had been folded into a larger project, one going back decades, investigating the fusion of man and machine as a means of extending life—a goal sought by the Bloodline for centuries.

But this research into cyborg technology proved to be a dead end. It became clear that it would never be a feasible means of sustaining or prolonging life, especially with the more promising advent of stem-cell research. At that point in time, the Bloodline turned its eye in a new direction, forsaking the macro world of robotics for the micro world of genetics.

But even Robert didn’t have full access to that newest venture.

Instead, he’d been left to oversee this older project. Neuro-robotics still showed the potential to be a lucrative new weapons technology for the military. If rat brains could fly jet planes years ago, why not something more ambitious for the battlefield of the future?

“Let me give you a demonstration of the hexapod,” Fielding said.

The researcher opened the titanium carapace of the metal crab, exposing the microelectronics inside. He seated the neural cylinder into the electrode base at the heart of the pod and secured everything in place. Next, he carried the device to a neighboring chamber in the clean room. It had been set up as a test maze—but this was no ordinary flat puzzle. This labyrinth filled the entire ten-by-ten chamber, rising through fifteen levels of tunnels, chutes, and spirals.