Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern Read Online Free PDF

ability to anticipate his every command. Without waiting for his response, the woman had spun on her heel and headed back to her own office.
    Kiesling called out, “And, Ms. Roslan…”
    “I’ll send one of the interns in with your coffee, sir.”
    He was still smiling as the young woman disappeared into the bright fluorescent lights of her outer office and the connected reception area, the door closing silently behind her.
    The late afternoon sun spread long bands of light across the heavy red cherry desk dominating the center of the office. The light added no extra warmth to the well air-conditioned room due to the heavy tinting on the windows—tinting that would have kept any onlookers from peering into the high security floors run by Kiesling’s special project division. Not that they had many onlookers there on the 71st floor, outside of a few ratty pigeons and the odd news chopper that would buzz by on one breaking news story or another.
    No surprises were revealed to Kiesling by the first pair of folders; they contained basic background information on Malcolm Weir, the man now referred to as ‘Designate Cestus’ there at Project: Hardwired: standard bio, exemplary service record, medical files from when he was first brought in eleven months earlier, and so on. As executive director and sole head of the division, Kiesling was intimately familiar with the background files of all twelve of the Project: Hardwired Prime units. After all, he had been the one who approved the addition of each of the men long before they were eventually brought under the project’s aegis.
    Weir had been the perfect Hardwired candidate and a model operative. The second batch of files, bound with “Eyes Only” tape and covered in “Top Secret” stamps, ran through each of the nineteen missions he’d undertaken in the nine months since he’d been on active duty—nearly double the assignments of any other unit.
    Kiesling whistled in admiration as he flipped through pages upon pages of mission logs, photos, maps and more from the Weir’s time out in the field, and wished he had the budget to build ten more like the soldier.
    The final folder, labeled “Under Review” across its cover, was what Kiesling had been searching for: the incident report and follow-up from Kabul.
    According to the documentation, Cestus had been operating at peak performance for a Prime unit prior to the operation—above peak if his team’s reports were accurate. Hell, he even exceeded Gauss’s results in every joint excursion they were tasked to. It was the reason Dr. Ryan had pushed so hard for Weir to be upgraded with the new nano-tech. The reactive A.I. of the nano-drones made the “living” metal of the soldier’s arms into some of the most deadly weapons on the planet for the types of covert missions he specialized in.
    Before he received them, the man had been a beast, thought Kiesling. With them, Designate Cestus had become Goddamn Death incarnate.
    The comfortable office chair creaked with Kiesling’s 185 pounds of muscle and slid a bit on the clear plastic floor protector it rested on as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his cluttered desktop. One hand shifted a black wireless mouse back and forth, causing the large flatscreen monitor nestled on one corner of the workspace to flicker on, while the other smacked the folder down and quickly turned to the next page.
    “Twenty kills within one minute of insertion,” marveled Kiesling. He wanted to view POV footage from Kabul to see the “complications” in real time, but was dismayed to have a blue error screen staring back at him from the glowing monitor. Intercom button tapped quickly by his long, tapered middle finger, Kiesling leaned back in his chair and asked aloud, “Melissa, something’s wrong with my computer. It’s telling me the system is down. Can you please tell me how it is possible for a billion dollar quad-redundant computer system to be ‘down?’ Is there