SPARE PARTS (The Upgrade Book 4) Read online

  SPARE PARTS

  THE UPGRADE SERIES #4

  Wesley Cross

  Contents

  JOIN THE UPGRADE SERIES

  Publisher information

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  JOIN THE UPGRADE SERIES

  Also by Wesley Cross

  JOIN THE UPGRADE SERIES

  To receive free books, get behind the scenes stories, and be the first to hear about new releases—sign up for the newsletter.

  See the back of the book for details.

  Publisher information

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by

  Cerberus Prints

  PO BOX 90399

  Brooklyn, NY 11209

  1

  The limo stopped in front of the train station, a rugged old building with a squeaky turnstile. The lights on the outside were out, but the moon was climbing, casting long shadows that seemed to move on their own. The wind swatted at the side of the car, trying to break in.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Jason Hunt said, putting his hand on the door. The handle was cold.

  “Are you sure about this?” The whites of Mike Connelly’s eyes shone in the rearview mirror. “I can’t protect you if you don’t let me.”

  “I have to do this alone.” Hunt buttoned the coat and opened the door.

  “The guy by the station—”

  “I saw.” Hunt interrupted him. “Six foot two, a righty, light on his feet. Probably a boxer. Must be one of Victor’s goons. I’m good. Keep the car here so we don’t spook them. I’ll see you soon.”

  He got out, closed the door, and started to walk. The warehouse where Victor Ye was allegedly having a meeting was a few blocks away.

  A combat sonar started beeping into his earpiece implant, feeding ghostly images of the stalker into his enhanced vision.

  Hunt picked up the pace as he turned onto a narrow street, choked on both sides by two grimy buildings. He could hear the man now without the aid of his systems—the urgent staccato of a hunter overtaking his prey.

  Jason took the first blow without turning back, his body armor implants buzzing like a hive of disturbed bees, as they dissipated the energy of the punch. He spun around and ducked under an uppercut, watching the man stumble after a miss.

  The man was good. He must’ve been a world-class contender back in his prime. Hunt stepped back from two lightning-fast probing shots and blocked another hook aimed at his temple. Then his prosthetic right arm shot out at eighty miles an hour, hitting the man in the chest and sending him flying.

  It wasn’t a fair fight. Not by a long shot. A cluster of tiny wires connected to his optic nerves fed live information into a powerful CPU implanted at the base of Hunt’s skull. The twitching of his opponent’s muscles, the slight shift in his balance, the movement of the man’s eyes. All that data was absorbed, analyzed, and refined to map out every move of his adversary before it even began. And then, the series of commands fired off by the enhanced movement unit, EMU for short, directly into the primary motor cortex, sent his body into a sequence of lethal moves no ordinary human could counter.

  Fighting you is like fighting an agent from the Matrix, Connelly said to him once as they were calibrating his implants after the installation.

  Hunt’s enhanced vision flashed amber as the computer identified a weapon in the attacker’s hand.

  He caught the knife with his left and then his bionic hand sprang to the man’s throat, crushing the windpipe in its mechanical grip.

  “What are you?” the man managed.

  Hunt didn’t answer as he watched the man black out. When his attacker’s eyes turned glassy, he lowered the unconscious body to the ground and continued to walk.

  The warehouse was an ugly square building with a flat, slanted roof and gray, graffiti-covered walls. Jagged pieces of broken glass in window frames glistened like sharp teeth of some prehistoric monster setting a trap. Ready to devour the unsuspecting prey.

  “Mike?” he said into the microphone as his implants scanned the building, layering his internal vision with transparent silhouettes. The green glow of infrared images and ghostly contours of x-rays scattered across the ground floor of the warehouse created a three-dimensional psychedelic mix. “You can pick me up in ten. I’m too late.”

  “Roger. Nothing on the scans?”

  “A few fellows are still here, but it looks like the party’s over. I’ll pop my head in and say hello.”

  “Stay frosty.”

  Hunt signed off and crossed the street, the echo of his steps ricocheting off dirty walls and diving into broken windows of abandoned buildings across the street. The rusty front door pulsated green in his vision, and he pulled on the brass handle, swinging it open. A whiff of stale air, and then a noxious cocktail of urine, feces, and rotten garbage filled his lungs.

  He walked in and closed the door behind him. Pieces of broken glass crunched under the soles of his boots as he walked through the expanse of the empty floor. The moon was high enough to let its ghostly light seep through and cast long shadows that zigged and zagged as he walked.

  “This is weird,” he said, cycling between x-ray and infrared.

  “What’s weird?” Connelly responded, the engine revving to life in the background. “Get out of the building and let me look at it.”

  “There’s nobody here,” Hunt said, looking at a few glowing shapes floating in the air in the middle of the empty floor. “But I can still see them.”

  “Get out of the building right now,” Connelly yelled in his ear, and Hunt grimaced as he turned down the volume of the incoming link.

  He walked closer to the floating shapes and switched his vision back to the normal view. A few small black devices the size of an old-fashioned flip phone were scattered on the ground, projecting the holograms up into the air.

  Hunt cried out in pain as the EMU crumbled him to the floor in a powerful motion. Then, it rolled him toward the window like a rag doll, no longer in control of his limbs, as he watched a few gaping holes appear where his body had been a moment ago.

  “Are you all right?” Connelly’s voice was tense but calm.

  “Be careful.” Hunt pressed his body into the wall. “There’s a shooter with what seems to be a fif
ty cal. My EMU recognized the shape of a barrel before I had a chance to process it.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Only my pride. Got thrown about like a puppet.”

  “Location?”

  “The building across the street. Second floor. Third window from the right if you’re facing the building.”

  “Roger.”

  Hunt got on all fours and crawled deeper into the building and away from the window.

  “Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think the shooter is a woman. I didn’t get much of a look, but it’s either a woman or a short man.”

  “Got it.”

  His sonar picked up the sound of the limo’s engine as the vehicle took a turn before entering the street. It seemed that Connelly was going to approach the building with the shooter from the back.

  “Let me know when you’re close,” he said into the mic. “I’ll distract her.”

  “Negative. Sit tight.”

  Hunt continued on all fours until he reached the last window facing the street and risked a quick peek outside. His head jerked back, his left cheek scraping the rough wall as the internal computer overrode his muscles. The wall behind him exploded, showering him in a fountain of debris and forcing him lower.

  “Damn. He’s a machine.”

  “Stay out of sight and keep the channel open.” Connelly’s voice was raspy, punctuated by the quick beat of his steps as the man sprinted.

  Hunt left the link open and crawled back toward the door, keeping his head below the windowsill.

  A few rapid flashes came from the building across the street as the sound of the shots crackled in Hunt’s head, simultaneously coming from the open link and through the air. Then a car engine revved in the distance and roared away, the sound getting fainter by the second.

  “Mike?”

  “The shooter’s gone. You’re clear to come out. It was definitely a woman, and she was alone.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Not enough to ID, I’m afraid.”

  Hunt stood up and walked toward one of the hologram projectors on the floor, and picked it up. The hologram flickered and turned off, the ghostly image disappearing without a trace.

  “Never seen these before,” he said, stepping outside and handing the device to Connelly. “Have the tech guys look at this.”

  They walked around the building from where the shooter had been hiding and back to the limo. Connelly opened the door and stepped aside to let Hunt in, but Jason stopped and looked around.

  “What?” Connelly said, visibly tensing and scanning the surroundings.

  “I don’t know.” Hunt shrugged. “But I feel like we’re being watched.”

  He dived into the car and let Connelly close the door after him.

  “Back to the tower?” Connelly asked, getting behind the wheel.

  “Yes.” He glanced at the building one more time as the car accelerated away. “It looks like justice won’t be served today.”

  2

  “Brian!” Mike Connelly yelled from the top of the stairs. “Can you check if the top floor is online? The lights should be solid, but they’re all blinking instead.”

  “Are you sure?” The man leaned over the banister and craned his neck to see Connelly. “I checked them a minute ago.”

  Connelly looked back at the hallway. A row of red LEDs on motion sensors installed on the wall was pulsating as if transmitting Morse code. “Yep. Still going.”

  “Weird. One sec.” The man’s head disappeared and Connelly heard a series of clacking noises. “How about now?”

  He looked back again. The lights pulsated quickly and then turned off completely. “Now they are off.”

  “Crap,” the man shouted. “I don’t understand. Engineering checked it a million times yesterday. I have to go back to the control room then. I’ll radio.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Connelly, along with a four-man team, had been at the location for over two hours now. Orion had purchased the small three-story building six months ago and since then, the place was gutted and rebuilt from inside out to become the company’s new security headquarters. Somebody jokingly christened it Langley, and the name stuck.

  It was appropriate, Connelly thought as he turned away from the stairwell and started across the hallway. The new location was going to serve as a state-of-the-art intelligence operation. The top floor would be occupied by support and clerical personnel and the first two levels by analysts, some of them alumni of the actual George Bush Center for Intelligence. But the most sensitive work, including black ops, was going to be in the massive, reinforced basement.

  “Boss?”

  The radio crackled on Connelly’s belt and he picked up the black rectangle to his face. “Yes?”

  “I’m resetting the system now. Stand by.”

  The lights on the wall blinked and then lit up with a solid red glow.

  “Looks good to me,” Connelly said. “How does it look on the system?”

  “All good here. The guys are already in the parking lot. Should we pack it up?”

  “Sure.” Connelly glanced at his wrist, checking the time. “Go on. I’ll do a last round and join you in a couple of minutes.”

  “Roger.”

  He turned off the radio and continued to walk through the hallway. Each station, including the floors, was sectioned with its own reinforced barrier like a submarine. In case of a fire or an attack, the building could be turned into a series of impenetrable fortresses.

  He walked toward the nearest door and hit the button, watching as the steel blades rotated from the slender gap in the wall like the petals of an alien flower. He then pressed the button again and the blades silently disappeared back into the wall. Satisfied, he started back to the stairwell, and that was when the windows lit up with a bright light and the building shook.

  There was almost no sound as the multilayered glass panels absorbed most of the shock, but Connelly didn’t need a confirmation. They were under attack.

  He fell on his knees and crawled to the window a few feet away from him, and took off his hat. Then he threw it in a tight arc above the lower part of the frame. The seventy-five-millimeter bulletproof glass exploded, showering him with shards and forcing him closer to the ground. A hole the size of a baseball appeared in the wall across the hall.

  “Shit,” he cursed under his breath. A rapid rattle of automatic fire came from the outside. At least somebody from his team was still alive. He needed to help them.

  “Boss,” the radio crackled, “stay away from the windows. They’ve got a sniper with some serious hole puncher.”

  Connelly scrambled to his knees and pushed himself into a sprint. Another blast shattered the window as he rushed by it, a few shards painfully biting into his right elbow, but he pressed on. A second later, he was in the relative safety of the stairwell, taking three steps at the time.

  “I’m coming to get you, Brian,” he barked into the radio as he ran. “Stay where you are.”

  “Okay. The guys were in the car. I’m sorry, I couldn’t do anything.”

  “Shut up and stay low.”

  Connelly put away the radio as he reached the basement entrance and sprinted through the hallway to the weapons room. He punched in the code, heaved away the armored door, and looked around.

  “There you are,” he muttered to himself and picked up an XM25 grenade launcher from the soft case and two five-round detachable magazines.

  Connelly pressed the alarm button and ran back up the stairs, and then a few seconds later got to the door leading to the parking lot. He heard the muffled sound of gunfire on the other side and Connelly sighed with relief—he wasn’t too late.

  He unlocked the door and, using it as a shield, glanced outside. A heavy thud reverberated through the reinforced metal, but the door held. It was too strong even for the fifty-caliber rifle.

  “Hey boss,” Brian said. The man was lying on his back, behind a slab of co
ncrete less than a foot tall that served as a perimeter around the building. He was holding a scarf to his left shoulder, keeping pressure on a wound. The light-gray material of his parka was covered in blood.

  “Hang in there,” Connelly said. “Have you seen anything?”

  “Three dudes in an armored Hummer, about two hundred yards from here on the other side of the main gate.” He waved with his good hand and grimaced. “Have no idea where the sniper is.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Help should be on the way; we just need to repel these guys. Two hundred yards, you say.”

  He loaded the magazine and manually set the distance on the range finder of the grenade launcher to two hundred and ten yards. “Give me some cover,” he said.

  Brian nodded, stuck the nose of his submachine gun above the concrete block, and let out a short salvo into the sky.

  As the shots echoed through the empty parking lot, Connelly stuck the snub nose of the grenade launcher over the ridge of the door, aimed over the black Hummer parked sideways across the road, and pressed the trigger.

  A 25mm low-velocity grenade zipped across the front yard in less than a second and detonated mid-air behind the armored Hummer, raining down death on the three men using the car as a shield.

  “I think I can hear the bird,” Connelly said. “Hang in there. The sniper will not stick around for much longer.”