Manipulator (19 page)

Slowly, he began to shuffle around on his feet. Owen saw it as some kind of nervous tick. He was showing all this confidence, but on the inside Eli was probably more on edge than everyone on Owen's team.

“But then… you approached me first," Eli continued. "And I was curious. That’s why I decided to go along with your game. So tell me now," he said, before his voice immediately changed to a slightly more sinister tone. "What’s going on?”

Silence filled the room. Someone had cranked the tension up to eleven. Owen slowly began to move his hand, reaching it around and down to his hip where he wore his weapon. He felt outsmarted and unprepared.
Something could go wrong at any moment.

Eli spotted his amateur move straight away. “You’re not killers," he said, talking directly to Owen, yet aiming his words at the entire group that stood before him. "None of you are. Either you tell me what’s going on, or I leave.”

Seconds passed, but they felt like minutes. Eye's darted from person to person, everybody was waiting for somebody else to make the next move. To say something. To say
anything
.

Say something.
Owen said to himself.
You need to be the one in control here.

“We don’t work for the FBI anymore,” he outburst, deciding that it was best not to hide anything from the man in front of him, although Owen's hand was still firmly planted on the handle of the weapon holstered at his hip.

Eli slowly started to nod, unsure as to whether or not Owen was really telling the truth.
Maybe this is an elaborate ruse to get my co-operation.
He thought.

“Then what do you want from me?” Eli asked Owen before turning his entire body to face Kate. “Because, and no offence Kate, what you told me about you needing my consultancy work doesn’t hold anymore, does it?"

“We need your PRoGRaM device,” Owen admitted straight off the bat, speaking honestly. There was still hope to make an ally out of him yet.

“What happened to yours?” Eli spat back at him quickly, the confusion showing obviously all over his face and in the tone of his voice.

“It was destroyed when our Analytic Base was bombed,” he answered.

Eli looked at him with his eyebrows raised, surprised by what he had just heard. “Shit,” he said slowly, drawing out the word for emphasis. He looked around the room at the three people staring back at him, and then laughed nervously. “Just what are all you people caught up in?”

“I have no idea,” Owen answered, keeping his tone solid and never once breaking eye contact with Eli. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

“Then lets make a deal,” Eli said, changing the course of the conversation and surprising Owen with his tactic. “I help you. You help me.”

“What have you got in mind?” Archer asked, wondering what Eli could possibly want from him.

“I remember you investigating me. And I know that you didn’t wipe any of my memories. Going on from that, I’ve not been arrested and charged with anything yet. You think that you can keep it that way? What I'm asking is straight up and simple. I want to stay out of the system. And I
know
that you can make that happen.”

“Done,” Owen said immediately, giving Eli the answer that he wanted to hear.
He has no idea that all the information we had on him was lost in the bomb blast that took out our PRoGRaM Analytic Base.

Eli nodded, pleased that he managed to work something out for himself in all of this. “So. Just what is it that your trying to do?” he asked. “No PRoGRaM device. No PRoGRaM Base. Cut off from the FBI. What the hell is going on with you lot?”

Owen spoke slowly. "Two weeks ago, my wife died in a car accident. A hit and run."

"I'm so-" Eli began.

"Save it," Owen said, quickly cutting him off.
His sympathetic words wouldn't mean anything anyway.
"A few days ago, I received a video telling me that it wasn't an accident. It told me that there are three people out there who are responsible for Annie's death. We're finding out what's really going on." He turned to face Nick, who was now sat anxiously at a table nearby, looking into a laptop. “Show him.”

Nick typed away without saying a word. Eventually, he turned the screen in front of him to where Owen, Eli and Kate stood and pressed play.

“Your name is Owen Archer. You were born on February 27th, in the year 2000. By the time you are watching this, you will be 35 years old. Don’t be surprised to see me, I can guarantee you that this is real. Today, is your wedding anniversary, and Annie is not with you. But she should be, and there are people to blame for that. First of all, a very important address that you need to know. 45 Redford Avenue. That address will mean everything to you, and only you know why.”

"That's where my wife died," Owen explained quickly yet quietly to Eli.

“I will keep this short, because I don’t have much time. There are three people responsible for Annie not being there. Their names are Marcus Ortega, Alex Morgan and Ethan Darkes. You must find these three. The voice said urgently, yet still barely understandable. They, and only they, can tell you the truth about everything. They can tell you the truth about Annie. That’s because they had everything to do with it. Fight for the truth.”

*END OF TRANSMISSION*

 
“Those three men, Marcus Ortega, Alex Morgan and Ethan Darkes, had something to do with my wife’s death. I need to find out what it was.”

Eli nodded solemnly, chewing his tongue uncomfortably as he watched the video. He understood the personal nature of the situation. Owen had been watching his reactions the entire time. Eli seemed genuinely interested. “We found Marcus Ortega," he explained. "Now we’ve found Alex Morgan. He’s in the PRoGRaM Prison System.”

"Woah," Eli replied with a raise of his eyebrows.
I certainly wasn't expecting that.

His tone of voice was noticeably lighter than it had been since he had walked in the room, causing the tension and the uncomfortable atmosphere to slowly evaporate. Everybody was finally beginning to ease into their current predicament.

"What do you know about them?" Kate asked Eli, wondering just how extensive this man's knowledge of PRoGRaM and all of its subsidiaries was. "The Prison Systems, I mean?”

Eli walked deeper into the large open common room of Owen's apartment. Everybody stood uneasily, watching Eli as he walked steadily across the room. He found a spot on a sofa nearby and dropped himself down into it, seemingly making himself feel at home.

I guess that settles it.
Owen thought.
He's a part of the team… for now.

“It’s a new idea based on the PRoGRaM designs," Eli began. "It takes the idea of putting the mind into a digital world to a whole new extreme. With the PRoGRaM Prison System, it’s not just about putting the mind into a digital world… it’s about keeping it there."

"That's insane," Kate said, piping up loudly. She locked eyes with Eli on the couch, who just shrugged his shoulders as if to say,
'What can you do?'
She was the only one who had no prior knowledge of the Prison Systems, and was bound to be the only one who spoke out in anger against them.
At least, that's what I want them to believe.

"The entire idea behind the Prison System was to house some of the most dangerous and unstable criminals," Eli explained, mainly talking to Kate from his comfortable position on Owen's couch. "Their minds were to be kept inside PRoGRaM indefinitely, with their bodies kept alive on the outside world by a small team of people."

"How could their bodies even survive that?" she asked, the anger still showing in her voice.
I really need to make this seem real.
She thought.
I need to stay in character.

"The people in charge of the Prison System constantly drip feed the inmates bodies with what they need to survive," Eli said, keeping it vague enough to satisfy her curiosity.

“So, mentally, the inmates are all kept inside the PRoGRaM world?” Kate asked. She needed to make all of them believe that until this point, she had never even heard of the PRoGRaM Prison System. She needed to keep the flow of the conversation going.
Ask the questions that a new girl would ask.

“Yes, but not the PRoGRaM world that we know," Owen said, chipping in and answering one of the few questions that he actually knew the answer to.

"Exactly," Eli confirmed. "The inmates are kept in a completely separate world. Now, this 'other world' is stored on a separate server system. As far as anybody is aware, it's a small environment, but nobody has any idea what the place looks like.”

I suppose that once you see it, that's where you're supposed to stay for the rest of your life.
Owen thought as he listened to Eli talk.

“What about death?" Kate asked, going to the next logical question and trying to keep up appearances. "If one of the inmates dies inside PRoGRaM, surely they’ll just wake up here, in the real world?”

“Yes," Eli answered, nodding his head. "But each of the inmates is secured down to a bed in the physical world, so death isn't an issue to the people running the Prison System. We can only guess that some sort of alarm goes off once an inmate wakes up, then the Prison System team goes down to the inmate and immediately puts him or her back under. The inmates must know that death is useless. They’ll just die, wake up in the real world and be kicked straight back into PRoGRaM. It’s the best prison in existence. It’s cheap, it’s easy to run, easy to manage. And the best part? It’s completely inescapable.”

“Yet… we’re going to break in," Owen slowly muttered under his breath as he gave in and took a seat on the sofa next to Eli. Kate continued to stand, but leant herself against a nearby wall for comfort.

“I figured that's what your plan was," Eli said with a sigh, dashing Owen's hopes. "Although… after everything I just said, I’ll admit, a break-in probably isn't the most difficult thing to pull off.”

Owen looked over at Eli on the opposite end of the sofa and felt a glimmer of hope. He knew that getting inside the Prison System was going to be tough. Eli had built the place up in his earlier speech to be an impenetrable fortress.

But now? Now he was speaking as if he knew a way in.

“This Prison System,” Eli continued. “It’s still in the trial phase, just like PRoGRaM. There is only
one
in existence, housing just under two hundred inmates.”

“And that helps us how?” Owen asked, confused as to where the man was going with his current trail of thought.

“Lets just say… they’re not exactly prepared for us.”

Chapter Thirty Nine

Date: November 23rd 2035 (Two Weeks Earlier)

Location: Redford Avenue, New York

“OWEN!” Annie screamed from behind him, scaring him half to death. He snapped his head around to look at where they were going.

But the problem wasn’t in front of them. It was to the side of them.

He quickly looked over at Annie, her voice urgently calling out to him, and that was when he saw it.

There was a huge white van heading straight for the side of their car. Owen felt Annie swing the steering wheel to the right to try and escape the monstrous van’s oncoming path, but it was just too late.

Annie screamed.

Owen held his breath.

A shockwave fired through their car as the van smashed directly into the driver’s side of their vehicle. The impact was so forceful that it almost instantly flipped their car over.

Owen's entire body shook violently as he felt the impact rip through his body, throwing him like a rag-doll around the car. His head smashed against the passenger side window, but still he was glad that he had his seatbelt on. His head injury had almost instantly rendered him unconscious. He could feel darkness coming for him, but he was determined to stay awake just that little bit longer.

The impact had flipped their car upside down and thrown it into a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn. He heard tyres squeal as the van that had just smashed into their car drove away as fast as it possibly could. Owen looked out of the smashed windscreen in front of him as he felt a small trickle of blood run down the side of his head. He was looking back down the road which only moments before they had been driving on.

"Annie?" he spoke into the air, unable to turn his head due to the pain firing through it.

No answer.

"Annie?!" he said again, more urgently this time. But still, Annie didn't respond. All that Owen could hear was the intense sound of the rain on the other side of the smashed windscreen.

Directly in front of him, Owen saw the dark figure still standing there on the sidewalk, with his hostage still kneeled down next to him. Owen watched as the man in the trench-coat mouthed some words to the bound man, before he remorsefully raised his gun and pulled the trigger.

Owen recoiled in horror at the distant sound of the gunshot, and then watched helplessly as the bound man fell face first into the sidewalk. The dark figured turned and walked away, but not before he glanced back to the scene of the crash, and stared right into Owen's eyes.

And right then, he couldn't keep his eyes open any more.

Everything turned black.

"Mr Archer, can you hear me?” a distant voice called out to him.
Am I conscious?
Light slowly seeped into his eyes as he wilfully pried them open. The lights were bright, almost forcing him to shut his eyes again.
Where am I? What's happened?