Read Online Operation Chaos by Richter Watkins - Free Book Online

a test? No, he was serious. He wanted her to have a weapon! It was like the man who’d kidnapped her and shot his assets had flipped a switch. She was, apparently, and maybe, actually, his partner.
    When Rainee reached under the seat and pulled out a flat container, she found inside an H&K laser nine with advanced infrared tracker. It was a beautiful weapon and exclusive to the most elite forces. It had a technology that allowed the shooter to lock onto a target and control the targeting.
    “You okay?” he asked.
    “So far,” she said with a bit of a sardonic bite. She checked the clip and chamber. “I’m not shooting at law enforcement under any circumstances.”
    “Nor am I. The ones we might tangle with aren’t law. They are on the other side of the street.”
    He’d given her the potential to take over. He’d handed her a weapon. And he seemed utterly nonplused.
    Then he went a step further and took her smartphone, which he’d confiscated earlier, from his cargo pocket and gave it to her. “Best if you put it on dead. We’ve been tracking you with the help of your phone.”
    Rainee did as directed. The latest phones could be rendered dead and completely untrackable.
    “You don’t like Doctor Raab?” he asked.
    Another odd question, she thought. “Raab is a brilliant man,” Rainee said, “but he has a towering ego filled with great ambitions and furious hatreds. Rules don’t mean much when you are on a quest to change the world.”
    Johnny Cash said, “In times like this, you have to go outside the box, outside the mainstream, and that is what Doctor Raab understands. We’re at war not just around the world, but here in every city in America. If the right people don’t win, we’re finished.”
    Christ, she thought, he sounds like a recording of Raab.
    Is he programmed? No, it sounds too emotional, too real. He sounds far more like a true believer than a robot.
    Rainee had run into extreme thinking among the generals, admirals, and scientists who oversaw some of the DARPA programs. It frightened her at times that they were involved in creating the enhanced-metabolic warfighter program because she knew they wanted to take it way past boundaries.
    She’d helped stop that by testifying to shut down one of the most extreme. Now she was being told it wasn’t shut down. And the proof was sitting behind the wheel.
    “What name can I call you?” Rainee asked. “Or is Johnny Cash okay with you?”
    “Keegan, John Keegan.”
    She didn’t believe for a second that was his real name, but it was what he wanted.
    Rainee felt the weight of the weapon on her lap. She could shoot him. She could control the situation. And she would do neither.
    They had a car behind them that Keegan was watching in the mirrors. She looked in the side mirror. It was the black Charger about four cars back.
    “They the assets’ control?” she asked.
    “Yes,” Keegan said.
    The Charger remained back and they continued for another twenty minutes, until the traffic slowed to a crawl for a checkpoint up ahead.
    Because of all that had happened in the past year around the world and in the States, with the collapse of many of the “support” programs, and mall attacks adding to the riots, the checks were extensive, and many vehicles, campers, and vans had been pulled over in the search area.
    For a moment, she thought Keegan was going to do something crazy as he reached into the left side of his cargo pants.
    She expected a gun. But instead, to her relief, he pulled out a thin wallet and put it between his legs.
    When they reached the checkpoint, the young security officer manning it walked up to the window as Keegan lowered it and offered up a leather ID folder from the wallet.
    The checkpoint sentinel looked at it, at Keegan, then Rainee. He gave a positive nod.
    The checkpoint sentinel waved them on, but it looked like his hand was caught between a wave and a salute.
    Keegan put the ID folder back in the wallet and returned