Read Online Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) by Shannon McKenna - Free Book Online Page A

at this point, so he took a leisurely inventory of the vault’s contents. Cutting edge weapons designed to be wirelessly synchronized with the newest gen of modified humans, who were basically a slave army awaiting the call to action, if and when it came.
    Soon.
    Mark was going to take their army and have bloody, noisy fun with it.
    It took the better part of an hour to hump all that equipment into his vehicle. With his enhanced musculature, boxes that would take two normal men to lift were feather light for him. But he still hated wasting his time and energy loading fucking crates like a dock worker.
    He was better than that. He was one of the original prototypes, goddamnit. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research and development had been plowed into producing supersoldiers. There’d been years of rough drafts, failed attempts, trial and error.
    Now their worst error, their roughest rough draft, their biggest failure had come back to devour them, suck their living brains and tear at their warm flesh.
    He couldn’t wait.
    He found the flash drive inside the vault that Lydia had described, and plugged it into his laptop. The control freq wands that generated the signal codes were there, too. He entered the general’s hacked passwords. Found a folder entitled Control Codes.
    But there were only six files in it. There should be files for twelve hundred slave soldiers in there. He already had the names and location of the six prototypes. He’d extracted them from Lydia under extended torture after she failed to open her safe. He knew who and where they were, but hadn’t been able to activate them without the freq wand.
    Now he owned them. But he wanted the other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four.
    Mark walked out, and nudged the general with his toe. “Where are the activation codes for the rest of the soldiers?” he asked.
    The older man’s drooping head came up. “Uh—in Lydia’s safe,” he said dully. “The rest of us only held codes for the six prototypes. Lydia kept the rest. That was our security strategy. We agreed on scattering all the various pieces of the puzzle so that no single one of us could ever—”
    “Like I give a fuck.” Mark vaulted back up into the cargo bed of his truck, and hoisted the colossal safe he’d taken from Lydia Bachmann. He put it down in front of the general. “Recognize this? Open it for me. Or you get to watch your grandson die real slow.”
    Kitteridge’s horror and despair were clear in his sig. The man was beaten.
    “I can’t.” His voice shook. “I never knew Lydia’s image sequence. Kill me if you want, but please let Joey go. He never hurt you.”
    “If you can’t open it, who can?” Mark demanded.
    “Lydia’s GodsEye coach could,” the general said eagerly. “Caroline Bishop. When you can work the interface, you’re supposed to re-key with a new sequence of images. But Lydia was so bad with the interface, she tripped security and burned a safe! I doubt she re-keyed the training sequence, just for fear of never getting back in.”
    “Did you know Caroline Bishop personally, General?”
    “Ah . . . ah, no, not personally. Dex Boyd, the GodsEye biometrics designer, sent her to us because she was the best coach—”
    “Tell me about her,” Mark directed. “What else do you know?”
    “Well, ah, only that she’s an artist. She gave me an invitation once to a gallery opening. Masks, I think. Dragons, griffins. Not my thing. I didn’t go.” Kitteridge turned to look at his grandson, who was groaning. “Joey? Are you OK?”
    Mark’s AVP rage blazed up, hot and maddening. Caroline Bishop, the GodsEye coach who had taught Lydia to use her fucking safe. The only other person on earth who could open it.
    He’d been hunting her ever since he’d first heard her name. Now that he thought about it, Caroline Bishop’s name had been the last coherent words that Lydia had ever spoken.
    So he hired GodsEye himself. Requested Caroline Bishop