The Chimera Vector Read Online Free PDF

lighter. It was Damien’s turn now.
    She stared at the incision in her arm. It was hard to believe what she was doing. Her thoughts didn’t feel like her own any more. For a moment, she considered secretly approaching Denton and explaining she was no longer fit for service. But he would never trust her again. And there would be nothing she could say to change that. If she returned to the Fifth Column, she would face her end. All the more reason for them to cross the Iraq–Iran border again and get back to Tehran, where they had some chance of obscuring themselves from the prying eyes of surveillance satellites.
    She gritted her teeth, pulled out the tube of Dermabond and applied a thin stripe of the violet liquid across the cut. She held it in place with two fingertips on either side. Once it was set, she poured whisky on Damien’s forearm, then watched him cut out his RFID. When he was done, she gave him the Dermabond.
    Jay returned. He was wearing a thick woolen jacket and a headscarf, but fortunately no glamor turban. There were two other jackets slung over his shoulder. He opened the driver’s door. ‘Bus is ready to roll.’ His breath fogged the air between them.
    ‘I didn’t even hear you,’ Sophia said. ‘Good work.’
    He dangled a set of keys. ‘Someone up there loves me.’
    Damien snorted. ‘That’s hard to believe.’
    ‘And we’re rich.’ Jay shoved a wad of notes into Sophia’s hands. ‘Two million rials.’
    Sophia checked the notes. ‘That’s around 200 bucks.’
    Jay unraveled his headscarf. ‘Right. Well, it’s all I could get my hands on without being compromised.’
    Sophia took the headscarf and wrapped the notes inside. She jumped out of the driver’s seat. She could see a wafer of orange upon the horizon. The sun was rising.
    She turned to Jay and handed him the knife. ‘We can go to Tehran. But you need to remove your RFID first.’
    He glared at her. ‘Are you fucking insane?’
    ‘Jury’s out on that,’ she said. ‘But there’s no point changing vehicles if they can still track us.’
    Grumbling, he snatched the knife off her and rolled back the sleeves of his jacket. ‘I’m only agreeing to this because Tehran has some seriously good beer.’
    ***
    Denton sat alone in the private jet as it skimmed the North Atlantic skyline. From above, the water’s surface looked restless and murky, reflective of his mood. The air phone rang. A sharp, high-pitched noise that irritated him.
    ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘We’ve tracked every military Land Cruiser within a radius of fifty klicks,’ Grace said.
    Denton had assigned Grace as leader of the team tasked with tracking and capturing the defective operatives: Sophia, Damien and Jay.
    ‘We have two suspect vehicles,’ she went on. ‘One is confirmed to contain military personnel, but the other has been abandoned at a large lake east of the border. It stopped moving one hour and twenty minutes ago. Echo Four India has disabled booby traps inside the Cruiser and recovered the RFIDs. The defective operatives cut them out.’
    ‘That shouldn’t be possible.’ Denton pinched his nose and exhaled hard. His ears popped. ‘Wait one.’
    He opened his laptop and navigated to the US National Reconnaissance Office portal. He logged in with his Department of Defense ID, then said to Grace, ‘Coordinates.’
    He keyed in the GPS coordinates as she read them out. He was using recent coverage recorded by the KH-14–2 spy satellite. Once the imagery loaded, he overlaid the road maps and fed in Grace’s team’s locations. With that done, he gave the terrain his full attention. He could see a lake near the eastern border that was shaped like an arrowhead and flanked by nearby mountains. He identified the abandoned Land Cruiser just north of a small town on the lake’s east side, and zoomed in on the ultra-high resolution image to inspect the river. Panning east, he followed the river as it snaked away from the lake towards a mountainous