The Judas Contact (Boomers Book 1) by Heather Long Page A

returned it to the cabinet and hung it up. She stared after him.
    “Ever?”
    He glanced back at her, his smile tight and self-deprecating. “Don’t feel sorry for me, doc. That’s not your job. Your job is the chip in my brain. You want to start that today? Or do you want food now?”
    No physical touching. No human contact. As a general rule, she didn’t like people all that much. But she had the option. She could hug her parents, her friends, and her dogs. How could he function without any contact? There had to be something they could do about that.
    The man sighed. “Ilsa?”
    “Yes?”
    “Work or food?”
    Exhaling, she looked at the various pieces of equipment. The basement laboratory held exam rooms at one end, and hospital sized scanning equipment. It was easily the full length of the house above and maybe more. She couldn’t tell. She had another vial of his blood. She could work on that after they did the first round of scans. Whether he was delusional or not—everyone deserved the chance to be hugged.
    “Work.”
     
    * * * *
     
     “Michael, we have a problem.” Rory stared at the paperwork she’d just extracted from the director’s safe. Getting back into the lab system was out of the question, but Director Vidal’s office was located in a downtown building just one block over from the Infinity Corporation. She’d had little trouble making her way up through the levels of corporate security. The safe cracker device Simon provided worked like a charm, too.
    “What is it?” Her lover’s voice murmured low and soft through the earbud. He was in one of the stairwells, just a hundred feet from her location. He preferred a sniper’s perch to boots on the ground, but he wouldn’t let her go alone into the seventy story building.
    “They’re already using her chips in people. The director has a list of live experiments running right now…including a special ops unit from the military.” A fist clenched inside her gut. Ilsa couldn’t know about the human testing. She was adamant that it wasn’t possible. But Vidal’s spreadsheets included the dollars invested, the project numbers, and the different types of chips.
    “Could she be lying to you?” Michael trusted no one outside of his team. And now Rory. He had his reasons and she understood them.
    “No. I don’t think she knows. None of the initials on these orders are hers. I don’t think they’re Vidal’s either.” The stylized SJC wasn’t one she recognized. But each report contained sections with those initials.
    They appeared on the three death certificates inside the folder, too. She used a small handcam to scan each page and then put the folder back where she found it. They’d need to decipher the medicalese.
    “Extract now. Simon says the Director is on the way up.”
    “Roger that.” She closed the safe and removed the device from the front. She’d already copied his hard drive. Her gaze split around the room as she debated.
    “Now.” Michael’s voice snapped when she didn’t exit immediately. She walked over to the desk and flipped over his phone and slid off one of the stoppers on the bottom. She planted the listening device and switched it to voice activation before covering it back up.
    She locked the door on her way out and just slid into the stairwell as the elevator dinged outside. That the director had an entire floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper to himself was just one more suspicious layer to the dangerous house of cards they were stacking.
    Michael caught her arm and jerked his head at the stairs. She nodded and followed him down. They needed more information on R.E.X. labs, its director, and their military contracts.
    She had to call her father.

Chapter Six
    The doctor was in the lab again. Garrett sighed. She was always in the lab.
    “Four days of study have led to the conclusion that subject Garrett possesses a microchip implanted in his cerebral cortex. Upon closer examination, via CAT and PET