"Hold your horses, I'm coming," Holly said through the closed door. The door swung open, and Holly raised her eyebrows at the two of them. "What's up?"
"Holly, I need to ask you a huge favor," Isabella said. "We're on the run, and need a way out of the city."
Holly looked down the hall, and gestured them in, closing the door behind them. "What happened?"
"Ferb figured out who - what - I am, and told the military," Isabella said.
"Which is what?" Holly asked, putting her hands on her hips. "And don't try telling me 'ops' again."
Phineas sat on the floor, leaning up against the wall. "She's an experimental biomechanically augmented super-soldier."
Isabella paused, her mouth open, then closed it. "What he said. It's probably better for you if you don't know more."
"Sweet merciful Jesus," Holly whispered, looking at them. "Seriously?"
Isabella nodded sadly. "Central military wants to vivisect me to make more like me."
"How likely is it that they'll track you here?" Holly asked, her eyes narrowing.
"I...maybe?" Phineas said.
"Okay, here's what we're going to do, then," Holly said. "You," she pointed at Isabella, "are going to tie me up so that I can get loose by morning if needed. Then you're going to take my car and head out. I don't want to know where. You'll need to leave the car somewhere and find another, but that'll be far enough out of the city that you're past the first round of checkpoints."
Isabella sagged with relief. "Thank you. What do we tie you up with?"
"Give me a minute to go to the bathroom first, then we'll figure it out."
General Archer had taken over the main part of the lab to track the efforts to recapture Echo Three while Ferb sat in the secure room, poring through the transmissions they'd finally found encryption keys for. He scanned through the dates, looking for one in particular, just over two years ago.
Jackpot. Now to prove she was lying.
He put headphones on and opened the video.
"Delta Bravo, this is Echo Three. Request target confirmation," a woman's distorted voice said quietly. Ferb wouldn't have recognized it if he hadn't known who it was, but now that he knew, it sounded like Isabella using a throat mic. He checked the code name list that Analysis had built up - Delta Bravo was the Dewdrop Bunker.
The video showed the parking lot in front of the Fletcher-Flynn Research Building. Along the bottom, a moving graph showed Isabella's heart rate.
From the angle the video was taken from, the camera was in a bus shelter on the street in front of the parking lot. Ferb knew that the security cameras covering this area had been mysteriously disabled, stuck showing a loop of the same hour over and over, so they'd guessed this was where the assassin had been. He could see his father's car sitting in a visitor space. Lawrence had stopped in to visit his sons for lunch, as he often did. But today...
"Echo Three, Delta Bravo. Confirmed. Your target is Lawrence Fletcher, fifty percent owner of Fletcher-Flynn Research," a woman's voice said.
"Delta Bravo, I think we have the wrong target," Isabella said.
"Echo Three, Linda Flynn-Fletcher is considered extremely unlikely to be the researcher. She is fifty percent owner because they're married." No, they were the owners because Phineas and I were too young when we set it up, Ferb thought.
"Delta Bravo, not her. Fletcher does not seem to be a researcher, and isn't here enough to be doing research. He's too easy to take out. The Cows would never leave their key researchers this vulnerable. Request permission to investigate alternate targets."
"Echo Three, Intelligence gives eighty-seven percent certainty that Lawrence Fletcher is your target. Proceed with mission."
"Delta Bravo, Intelligence needs to pull their head out of their ass. He's parking in a fucking visitor spot here." Ferb chuckled to himself as Isabella continued. "I'm telling you, this is not the target, and killing him will just alert the real researcher. We won't get a second shot here."
There was a long pause. Suddenly, a bright red A flashed in the corner of the video, and Isabella gasped in pain as her heart rate spiked upwards. "Ah! What the fuck was that for?" Isabella asked after the A went away.
"Echo Three, Mike One says it's not your job to question Intelligence's conclusions," the other woman said reluctantly. "You are ordered to proceed with the mission or face Lima sanction." Ferb checked the list again - Mike One was General Maybourne, and Lima was the Liquidator.
"Delta Bravo, understood," Isabella said. "Deploying."
The video looked down, to the small case Isabella was carrying. She set it on the ground and opened it. A dozen small robots sat inside, flat squares with a leg coming off of each corner. Her hand retrieved a small remote with a touchscreen controller, and she quickly activated it. The robots awoke and, following her instructions, climbed out of the case. That's how she did it, Ferb thought. He'd looked at the security tapes and not seen how the bomb was planted, but the robots would have been far too low to the ground to be visible from the security camera. Her seat had been carefully chosen to be out of the fields of view of all of the cameras.
The robots snuck across the parking lot at Isabella's deft commands, finally reaching Lawrence's car. Ferb could see her guiding them into place with the remote, focusing themselves so that they'd annihilate the passenger compartment. A few moved to the gas tank, while one sat itself on top of the starter. Once they were all in position, the remote went back into the case, which was picked up.
"Delta Bravo, in place. Leaving a camera and heading to safe house."
"Echo Three, understood. Get out of there."
A small camera came out of the case, and was stuck to the side of the bus shelter. A minute later, a bus stopped, and Isabella got on, flashing a monthly pass to the driver. She rode along for a bit, then got off a few blocks away, at a local hotel. Inside her room, the remote came out of the case again, and she tuned it to the camera, bringing up a view of the visitor parking lot again.
"Delta Bravo, beginning monitoring."
"Echo Three, understood. We watch with you."
A few minutes of silence followed, then Lawrence came out of the building. Ferb wanted to warn him, seeing him climb into the car, but knew it was far, far too late. He started the car, and suddenly it vanished in a brilliant flash, an explosion echoing through the street. Several cars nearby started to honk and flash their lights as their alarm systems activated.
"Delta Bravo, mission complete," Isabella said quietly. "Removing camera." She pressed a button on the remote, and the screen turned off. Ferb nodded, remembering the oddly melted hole in the bus shelter. They'd guessed it had been a piece of hot metal thrown from the explosion.
"Echo Three, confirmed. Come on home. Mike One says well done." A brief pause, and then a whisper. "I miss you."
She really did try to argue against it, he thought, before another realization came to him. If they'd activated the Agonizer, there was presumably a transmission that activated it that he could use. He skimmed back through the video to the point where the A showed up, then checked the timestamps. Looking through the transmission logs, he found a ten-second burst at just the right time. When he decrypted it with the codes they'd found, it contained just a timestamp and a brief code: E3C2. Echo Three, control setting 2?
He looked up at the frame he'd built to restrain Echo Three while they did experiments, and pondered how he'd have to adjust it. He'd assumed Echo Three would be male and about six feet tall, not...
He took a deep breath. Not a woman who looked harmless, and watched Space Voyagers with Phineas, and enjoyed the company cafeteria, and actually listened to Carla's interminable stories about Minnesota. Not the person his brother had fallen in love with. He could see her there, in his mind's eye, shackled to the frame, screaming as he cut into her...
He shuddered, and had to look away. It had been different when Echo Three was a cipher, a nameless evil. But Isabella was neither. She was a person he knew, who had been forced into a situation that led them all to this point.
A thought came to him, and he skipped through the videos until he found another familiar date. He'd seen this one from another perspective, but was curious what it looked like from Sierra Six's.
The video came up on his screen. "Delta Bravo, this is Sierra Six. Preparing to take my perch," a woman's voice said through a throat mic. Under the distortion, it sounded like the voice that had been mission control for Isabella's mission. She was riding an elevator up in a building two blocks away.
"Sierra Six, Delta Bravo," Isabella's voice said. "Confirmed. Your targets are Phineas Flynn and/or Ferb Fletcher, head researchers of Fletcher-Flynn Research."
The elevator doors opened on the top level. Ferb saw the corridor out to the balcony. He and Phineas had planned this out carefully, figuring that they'd probably send a sniper next, and planning out the optimal spots for a sniper to use. Then they set up traps in each of them that would detect the high-power sniper rifles that Dewdrop's Sierra team used.
Indeed, as Sierra Six walked down the corridor, steel doors clanged shut around her. Along the bottom, the heart rate jumped upwards. A hiss from the air vents indicated the knockout gas being pumped in.
"Shit!" Sierra Six said. "Delta Bravo, I'm trapped." She threw herself forward at high speed, crashing into the steel door without effect. She kicked at the doors, walls, and even the floor several times, only to find that Ferb had carefully reinforced them all to be secure against even enhanced attacks. Frowning, she sniffed. "Gas. I've got maybe a minute before it'll knock me out, and I don't think I can break out in time."
"Sierra Six, are you sure?" Isabella asked, worry in her voice.
"Yes." A pregnant pause, and then Sierra Six whispered, "Do it, Isa. I don't have any other way out."
Isabella was choked up as she said, "Activating Lima." In a hoarse whisper, she added, "I'm sorry, Sophie. I love you."
A bright red L flashed in the corner, and Sophie gasped in pain. "I love you too," she coughed. The camera dropped down, coming to rest on the floor. Ferb could hear the sickening sounds of Sophie choking to death as the L continued to flash. At the bottom of the screen, the heart rate display fell to zero.
He pulled the headphones off and closed the video. A check of radio transmissions found a likely one, which he decrypted; it had a timestamp and the code S6C1. Sierra Six, control setting one. And so a young woman died at her lover's hand.
There was a knock on the door, and Archer's voice saying, "Fletcher? Got something for you."
Ferb wiped his eyes, then stood and opened the door, letting the general in. He raised an eyebrow in inquiry as the door closed.
"Realized that we'd put in the fancy new scanners in Danville City Hall before the Owners' Ball. We lucked out there, they had the data on a sixty-day retain cycle. Another week and this would have been gone." Archer dropped a thumb drive into his hand. "All the deep-scanner records of that night. Echo Three should be in there. Let's take a look."
Ferb nodded and led Archer to his computer. He put the drive in, bringing up the scan. He nodded as he looked it over. "Very subtle differences, but if someone had had cause to look at them, they would have noticed." He brought up Phineas's scan for comparison. "Notice how Isabella's muscles are darker in the scan. Denser. Little dark bits along the lungs indicating the implants."
Archer leaned over his shoulder. "Huh. So, anything useful you can get out of these?"
"Quite a bit, actually. These are the first high-resolution scans we've gotten of a Dewdrop soldier." He touched a few keys, banishing Phineas's scan to the side and merging Isabella's scan with his existing Dewdrop information. He zoomed in to a small nodule in her left shoulder. "We can see how the remote-kill system integrates to the rest of her nervous system now, and it's completely different than what we expected."
"Remote-kill system? You mentioned that earlier. What is it?"
"Sorry. What we thought was a self-destruct is actually a remote-kill system. It was triggered by mission control, not by the agent. Two settings, 'pain' and 'kill', called the 'Agonizer' and the 'Liquidator'. See, there's the decoder chip there, too small for a low-res scan to pick it up. It looks like it uses positive control, so instead of removing all four nodules simultaneously, we just disconnect the antenna here and it's done."
"Hm," the general said, rubbing his chin. "But if it's all controlled externally, we don't want to disable it. Once we capture her, we can use it to keep her under control. Your brother, too, for that matter."
Ferb raised an eyebrow at the general.
"Look, I know he's your brother, but clearly on this project, he can't be trusted. He'll be lucky to avoid a collar of his own. But we can use the two of them as leverage on each other. As long as they cooperate, they get to spend time together. He stops cooperating, we start testing her pain threshold. She stops cooperating...we can find something to do to him. If he's collared, there's a shocker in it."
Ferb nodded as his mind screamed. Not my brother, you don't.
Archer clapped Ferb on the shoulder. "Good job, Fletcher. See if you can nail down the frequency and coding for the transmitter before your brother decides to disable it."
Ferb paused for a moment. Phineas probably will try to disable it. But he thinks you need to remove all four nodules, and I'd bet that would kill her. Without the nodules providing positive control of the implants, they'll self-destruct. He remembered seeing Sierra Six die, gasping for breath, and suppressed a shudder. "I was able to watch a Liquidator message get sent, so I know how to send them. Can you get your men to set up a high-powered transmitter on..." He flipped through the transmission list until he found the one he wanted. "308MHz. I'll hand off the coding."
"Is it safe? If we just broadcast on that frequency..."
"It's timestamp-based and encrypted. Anything without the right codes will be ignored."
"Sounds good. I'll get them going on a transmitter. We can build a primary one here, then set up repeaters. Send out the pain signal until she surrenders."
Ferb nodded. We'll see about that. "I'll send a morse code surrender message, then we can set it up to send at intervals. Thirty seconds on, five minutes off."
"Why?"
"She said it was policy not to run it more than thirty seconds to keep them from injuring themselves."
Archer snorted. "Do what works." He turned toward the door, then turned back. "308MHz, you said?"
"Right."
He poked into the code systems, trying to make sure he found the right way to encode it. Can't afford to get this one wrong.
Hopefully, some day, Isabella might forgive me for what I'm about to do, but I think it's the only way to save her life.
"First set of roadblocks ahead," Phineas said as he slowed to a stop behind the wall of cars that blocked the highway. "Guess it's time to find out how good our fake ID is. And hope they haven't gotten pictures out to the roadblocks yet."
Isabella swallowed the bite of pizza she was chewing, and said, "My ID looks fine. You haven't said what yours is yet." They'd stopped to pick up a pizza to let her rebuild her energy reserves as they drove northward in Holly's car.
He grinned and took his wallet from his pocket, removing the blank card from the back. He pulled out his driver's license and handed it to Isabella, saying, "Hide this."
She slid it into the crack between the seat and center console. "Now what?"
"What's the name on your ID?" he asked.
She pulled out a card. "Kelly Brown."
"Address?"
"117 Taylor Street, Danville."
Phineas pressed his thumb onto the blank card, and said, "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
The card spoke in a quiet voice. "Data?"
"Jacob Michael Brown. 117 Taylor Street, Danville."
The card filled in with text, and a picture of him. It looked exactly like a valid driver's license for one Brown, Jacob Michael who lived on Taylor Street.
"Impressive," Isabella said.
"Thanks. Little toy I created to help our agents a while back. I kept one for myself. Should have kept two, I could give you one." He slid it into his wallet, then put his wallet back in his pocket.
The car crept forward to the checkpoint, where two armed soldiers were checking identification for the people in each car. A young uniformed black woman signaled to Phineas to roll down his window, which he did. "Can I see your identification?" she asked in a bored voice.
Phineas fished out his wallet, retrieving the magic ID card, while Isabella pulled her own fake ID out. He passed both of them over, and she glanced at them, then into the car. "Thank you, citizens," she said as she passed them back. "Move along."
"Thank you," Phineas said as he smoothly accelerated away from the checkpoint.
"We won't get away with that again," Isabella said. "They're still getting organized."
"Nope. Let's hope we can get a ways ahead before we need to get off the highways. Where's the next permanent checkpoint, do you remember?"
"About another hundred miles a...augh!" Isabella tensed suddenly, her face freezing in a rictus of pain.
"What is it?" Phineas asked.
As quickly as it had come, Isabella sagged, then winced as it returned. It vanished again a moment later, then came back for one more short pulse before it paused briefly. "They found the Ag..." She winced again, this time for longer, before it turned off again. Two more longer pulses followed before another pause. "The Agonizer," she gasped. "But what...?" Another flash of pain, short, and then a longer one before a shorter one.
"Morse," Isabella gasped. "S-O-R..."
"I don't know Morse," Phineas said. "But if you can tell me the letters, I'll keep track of them."
He drove along, building words out of the letters Isabella said in the pauses. Finally, she sat back in her seat, the transmission apparently complete. "What did it say?" she asked, her voice rough and dry. She curled her legs under herself, shivering a bit.
Phineas cleared his throat. "Quote: 'Sorry, Iz. Liq uses pos ctrl. Detach rod left shldr. A thinks Det. Good luck. F.'"
"What does that mean?"
"It means that he's figured out that we don't want to disable the Liquidator the way we were thinking, because the implants will melt if the control nodes aren't there. Instead, we should disconnect the rod in your left shoulder. I remember seeing in one of the autopsies that there was a conductive rod there, but we weren't sure what it is. I bet it's the antenna."
"How do we get to it?"
"We find an infirmary we can...borrow."
"What does 'A thinks Det' mean?"
"Archer thinks we're going to Detroit."
"So which way do we go?"
"I think, up through Minnesota. It's the next-closest way out, and they wouldn't think to look for us that way."
Her breathing had slowed. "I'm not sure if I want to thank Ferb or kill him right now."
"Can't say I blame you. He did apologize, though."
"How do we know if this thing works?" General Archer said, glaring at the transmitter unit.
"We can't be sure until we catch up with them. They'll get out of range of it eventually, anyway."
"Okay. We'll get repeaters going all the way to Detroit." He looked down at the frequency readout on the transmitter. "306MHz. I'll get people on it." He started to walk off, then paused. "306? Is that right?"
Ferb nodded. "I think so." He'd hoped that Archer wouldn't notice that he'd bumped the frequency down after he finished sending the Morse code message. The transmitter was now sending on a sequence of 30 seconds on, five minutes off, but this way, it wouldn't actually affect Isabella.
Archer nodded and went over to his aide, who looked up from his secure phone. They talked quietly.
Ferb pulled out his phone and bought a plane ticket for his mother, then sent her a message.
Mother -
It's been too long since we visited Candace and Amanda in England. I'm going to be busy for a few days, but why don't you go ahead and greet them for me?
F
When the war had been going poorly for Central, they'd made plans to get her out if things went wrong; he could only hope she remembered them.
Archer came back over. "Can you double-check the 306 thing? I'd swear that wasn't it."
Damn.
Ferb led the general back into the secure room, bringing up the list. The general, looking over his shoulder, said, "There. 308. I thought 306 sounded wrong. I'll go tell the folks setting up repeaters." He reached over and turned the knob.
Sorry, Isabella.
