The Paradise Key (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 5) Read online

  The Paradise Key

  A Harvey Bennett Thriller

  Nick Thacker

  Contents

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  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Afterword

  Mark for Blood: Preview

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Also by Nick Thacker

  About the Author

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  Have you read the first book in this series, The Enigma Strain?

  You can certainly enjoy this book even without having read The Enigma Strain, but if you’d like to start from the very beginning and follow along in order, you can get The Enigma Strain FREE:

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  Prologue

  THE CHILD SAT BETWEEN THE two trees, waiting for death. He knew it would come — his caretaker had told him as much. The two trees were supposed to provide comfort, the feeling of protection.

  But they couldn't provide safety.

  He would die, just as they all would. It was not a thought that plagued the boy as much as concerned him. He knew about death, as any child of his age did. He understood it, agreed with it. Everything must die. The jungle around him, the trees and plants and animals, all of it must go. It was told to him through the stories shared around the fire, and sometimes directly from the older children when they brought him out with the men to hunt.

  He was not allowed to speak in those times, but that did not mean he misunderstood. He knew what death was, and he knew it was coming. The two trees offered solace, but not hope. They, too, would die. Not today, maybe many years from now, but they would shrivel up and disappear just like his ancestors — the mothers and fathers of his own mother and father, just as they had. His caretaker, too, would die.

  But death was an easy thing to understand when you looked at it from a distance. When it was a story told by an elder around a fire, or a memory described by a hunter after a kill. The child remembered these stories, and they flooded his mind as they came back to him.

  He remembered his parents’ death, one after the other, struck down by a blow from a neighboring tribe, one even more ruthless than his own. They were gathering food, their only son between them. He was crouching in the brush when they came, not even slowing to search the area. So he had survived, and he had simultaneously learned of death firsthand.

  He remembered the feeling. The quick snap of life taken away, not fully recognizing that he would never speak to them again. They were gone, taken brutally and quickly, yet all he could remember was the way his mother had dropped the food she was carrying, spilling it all over the forest floor. The waste of it; he hadn’t even reached out to grab it.

  He had returned to the village to find it had not been changed in any way. His family and friends worked, played, and slept, as if nothing had happened. No one had known about the attack until he had told them. There was a ceremony, as there always was, and then he was given to a caretaker and life had resumed as normal.

  Death was here, and it was coming for him.

  He felt it, stronger than he had felt it when it had taken his parents.

  Stronger even than the feeling he had when listening to the stories. The forest took everyone, they said, but the taking was always far more brutal when it wasn’t the forest doing the work.

  He heard the screams. They’d found the village. His home, his caretaker. All of them were there. There were no hunts today, and there were no scouting groups. Everyone would be at the village, preparing the food and clothing. There were three women carrying children, and they would need preparations for their young. Everyone was there, everyone screaming. The men howled with sporadic war chants, not together and organized but scared, knowing.

  He crouched closer to the forest floor. He touched the ground, feeling the forest crying out in complaint at the attack. It was all a part of them, a part of him. He was old enough to know that now. They were connected, the forest and the trees and the animals and the tribes. Even the tribes they fought, they were connected.

  His caretaker had explained it once, in terms of a story that he had forgotten the details of. But he knew the premise: they were all part of the same story, part of the same world here. Life was far more important than bringing upon the death of others.

  So he had run, without thinking and without looking back, when he had first heard the heavy trudging of the feet, crashing through the forest. They were not another tribe, they couldn't be. They were too loud, too big. He was scared, but he was able to push it away and focus on running toward the trees. The trees where the ceremony had taken place, the trees that towered over their small village. He had climbed them once, only to discover that the trees were hardly the tallest around. They poked at the canopy and even scraped it some places, but the inside roof of the canopy itself, he was surprised to learn, was formed by the bottom of even taller trees.

  The world was a large place, he had learned that day. It was large, and he was a small part of it. He didn’t know how large — his people didn’t worry about things like that — but he was always fascinated by the thought of it. The trees he had come to trust loomed over him, reminding him that even when he thought the biggest thing around was staring down at him, there was something even bigger out there, somewhere.

  Those bigger things were crashing around, causing the screams and subsequent silencing of his people back in the village. He didn’t dare look, for fear of what he might see. Maybe it would be over soon, but what then? Where would he go? The nearest tribe was hostile, and they would jump at the chance to bring death upon him just as the bigger people were bringing now.

  So what to do? He waited, crouched and small and shivering in the forest, the two trees offering what little they could — solace and sympathy, which he could feel through the ground. They were telling him that they were there, but that they wer
e sorry they couldn’t do more. They were sorry they couldn’t help, that they —

  One of the bigger people crashed around and came to his spot by the tree. He thought for a moment, hoped, that they wouldn’t see him. That he had somehow become a tree, or a bush, or something that didn’t seem like it needed death brought upon it.

  But they saw him. He knew it when the feet of the thing turned toward him, the shadow of it creeping out and over and around him, consuming him like its owner didn’t even need to move to know it had captured him. He sobbed, once, then told himself to be strong. Death comes upon us all, he told himself. Death is not the enemy.

  The feet stepped forward, and he smelled the person. This was certainly not another tribe. The legs were covered, as well as the feet. Some sort of cloth or skin, bunched in places but sturdy, stained with the dirt and mud of trekking through the jungle for days. Splashes of silt on the things covering the feet. Not sandals, but something bigger. Stronger.

  The feet moved again, but not toward him. They simply shifted, moving slightly, leaving an ugly streak in the mud. He felt a hand grasping at his hair, which he had kept just long enough to cover his ears. It was black, oily and nice, some of the nicest hair of any of the children his age. He was proud of it.

  The person’s hand ripped his hair upward, and he yelped in pain. His hair stayed attached to his head, and he stood up with the force of the person’s hand. He fought against the hand, but the hand was wrenched around his hair and yanking him up, up.

  He cried now, openly. He was a child, and he knew children were allowed to cry. They were encouraged to think about their tears with wisdom, as reactions to a particular feeling. If one could understand the feeling, one could fight against the tears, it was said.

  He knew the feeling — pain. Loss. He wanted his caretaker.

  He wanted his mother. His father.

  He wanted anyone.

  He looked up, forced to by the hand that was wrapped tightly into his hair. The face was of a man’s, but the man’s skin was light, not bronzed by the sun but browned by the mud. His eyes sparkled, a light-greenish blue that the boy had never seen before.

  He was suddenly scared. The fear gripped him tighter than the hand in his hair, and he sobbed once again. The man stood, frozen. Examining him. Questioning him.

  He wanted to speak, to ask why. To understand. The tears kept coming. The man kept staring.

  Finally the man released his hand from the boy’s hair and reached into a bag he was wearing. It was also made of skin, some sort of leather that the boy hadn’t seen before. The man watched the boy with those sparkling eyes as he fumbled through his bag.

  He retrieved something from inside the bag, held it tight in his hand. It was sharp, pointed and clear, like water that had been hardened into a tube shape and placed around a shiny, bright point. He pointed it at the boy, near his left arm.

  The boy shook, sobbing.

  The man looked down at the boy, smiled. He opened his mouth and spoke words the boy didn’t know, didn’t understand.

  “You will do just fine, boy,” the man said. “Just fine, indeed.”

  1

  THE MAN WATCHED HIM THROUGH the glass, his hands and arms pressed up against the pane, like an animal anxiously awaiting for his captor to feed him. The man cocked his head sideways, watching Dr. Joseph Lin as he fumbled around with the gray, metal box in his hands.

  Dr. Lin knew what the man wanted. It was what they all wanted.

  Freedom.

  The man was docile, tamed through hundreds of cocktails of medications and sedatives, but Dr. Lin couldn’t help but feel like the subjects were always watching for a mistake, for an opening. Something they might be able to take advantage of.

  He wouldn’t fail today. He hadn’t failed yet, and he wouldn't now. The task was simple, mindless even, but then again that was why it was easy to fail when performing it. The mundane tasks were the ones to be worried about — a person could go through the motions much more easily with these types of tasks and assignments, and that’s where mistakes were made.

  It wasn’t the large-scale, complicated things he needed to worry about. The multi-layered tasks that required a nuanced understanding of something or a delicate hand were, in a way, easier to perform flawlessly. He was the best in the world at those types of things, which was why he was here in the first place.

  It was the easy things, the simple and repetitive that he needed to be most careful with. That was how he — a world-renowned scientist — had ended up doing the job of one of the lab assistants; the girl had been careless, she had lapsed and allowed a small oversight to become a large mistake.

  And here in the lab, mistakes were unacceptable. The assistant had learned that the hard way, but in this environment there were no second chances. There were no lessons — it was perform or be removed.

  Dr. Lin was disappointed with the girl’s removal, as she had been a good assistant. But he also understood the reasons behind it. He was calm, centered, not allowing the assistant’s removal to affect his work, and for that he was proud. He could do the work of a lowly assistant. He could stoop to that level and get the job done. It would mean a later night for him — his own work sat by idly awaiting his return — but he would finish.

  The man brushed up against the glass, an inquisitive look on his face. Dr. Lin watched him for a moment. The man turned his head again, his eyes searching the doctor’s face. There would be nothing there for him to read, Dr. Lin knew. Even if Dr. Lin had been the type of man to allow the weakness of emotion to show on his face, this man on the other side of the glass was incapable of recognizing and acknowledging it. That function of his neural programming had been stifled to the point of being useless. The ‘empathy gene,’ or ‘emotional resonance,’ the marketing suits upstairs called it. The ability for a human to recognize, acknowledge, and respond to a particular micro-expression.

  Dr. Lin opened the metal box. The lid snapped up abruptly, as if it had been fitted for a slightly smaller box, and Dr. Lin peered inside. He reached in and grabbed the first tube that lay on top of the pile. He closed the box, then set it down on the cart that sat next to him. He reached for the syringe on the cart and placed the tube inside the back of the syringe.

  The man inside watched him. Waiting. Knowing what was coming but unable to react in any overt way.

  Dr. Lin pressed the tube down into the syringe until he felt and heard the slight popping sound that told him the medication’s seal had been opened and was ready for injection. He turned to the man behind the glass and held up the medication.

  “Time for your medicine, 31-3,” he said. His voice was quiet, softened from exhaustion. He’d already been awake for twenty-four hours and he knew his job would continue for at least another ten. He was glad there were no meetings scheduled, no reason to use his voice much.

  The man eyed him, not nodding or shaking his head. He stared. Waited. Knowing. Patient yet unaware of his own patience. Hungry, yet sated. Just… there.

  Dr. Lin slid open the fist-sized door in the center of the glass, revealing a rectangular hole. The scent from the other side wafted out, a mixture of sweat and feces. He made a face, then recovered. The man did not move. Dr. Lin moved back toward the hole, involuntarily holding his breath. The man nudged toward the rectangular hole, then stopped about three inches from it. He looked up at Dr. Lin, waited for him to nod to continue, then he pushed himself against the glass. The skin of his right arm, just below the shoulder, was pushing through the rectangular hole in the glass now, and Dr. Lin reached down and aimed the point of the needle at the open area of skin.

  He leaned forward. Pushed the needle onto the man’s skin. The man watched, interested, yet unaware of what was happening. Dr. Lin held his breath, an old habit. Helps to calm the shaking, his residency supervisor used to say. Everyone shakes, even when we don’t realize we’re shaking. He poked the skin, watched the man for any reaction. There was none. He drove the needle down, farther into
the layer beneath the skin, right before it hit bone.

  Dr. Lin continued to watch the man’s face with his peripheral vision, another habit yet knowing what he would see. Nothing. The man was completely unfazed by the needle, just as he had been every other time. Dr. Lin waited a beat, then began pushing the medication down through the syringe, out the hole in the end of the needle, and into the man’s bloodstream.

  If there was pain, the man didn’t register it. He stared up at Dr. Lin, both men nearly eye to eye, and Dr. Lin moved his gaze to focus directly on the man’s face. Still no change. Still no registration of emotion. No registration of anything, really.

  But Dr. Lin felt something. He felt the wave of surprise, the bizarre realization of what was happening. Or rather, what wasn’t happening. The scientific reasons behind it, still unknown to him or anyone else, the hundreds of studies and research papers he’d read and pored over, the talks and presentations he’d heard and seen over twenty years of practicing medicine. His mind raced through these resources but every time it came up blank. Every time there was a disconnect, as if there were something out there he was forgetting that would explain everything.