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Linwood Barclay

Chase

For Neetha,

who never stops believing

Prologue

The moment the White Coat entered the room filled with cages, the prisoner just knew what he was planning. The White Coat was going to kill him.

It might have been the way White Coat man smiled at him through the bars of his cage. The man almost never smiled. He looked at the prisoner through his oversized, black-rimmed glasses. This White Coat was in his fifties, with thinning grey hair. He was a spindly, pale man who spent most of his days sitting at a computer or supervising in the lab, where many of the experiments were conducted and the installations performed. A security card that allowed him to move freely through the building hung around his neck on an elastic strap.

The security card displayed his picture, and his name: SIMMONS.

It made sense to think of him by his actual name. There was only one Simmons, but there were very many White Coats. White Coat men and White Coat women. Some of the others the prisoner had seen over the years were Daggert and Wilkins and the red-haired woman they called Madam Director.

It had been a long time since the prisoner had had a good feeling about any of them. The White Coats were not good people. Oh sure, they fed him and looked after him, trained him. But they did not love him.

There’d only ever been two White Coats — that man and that woman — whom the prisoner really believed were his friends. But he hadn’t seen them in a long time. A good twelve months now. The prisoner had liked them a lot. He’d liked to hear their stories, and had felt warm all over when they had rubbed and patted his head with affection.

The prisoner was pretty sure something bad had happened to them.

But the more immediate concern was Simmons.

What had caught the prisoner’s attention was that Simmons had both hands in the pockets of his long, white coat, as though he was hiding something. The prisoner had a pretty good idea what it might be.

The prisoner moved warily towards the back of his cage.

The other captives must have noticed something was up, too. There were nine others in here, each in his or her own cage. The cages were stacked against the one wall, five in the bottom row, five in the top. Three of the captives began to snarl and bark and pace, although pacing amounted to little more than walking in a tight circle. They had to be picking up the same signals from Simmons as the prisoner.

The prisoner wished he could communicate with his fellow captives, to know what they were thinking. But the White Coats had been careful to disable any sort of sophisticated communication between the subjects, fearing that if they could forge mental links they might band together against the White Coats. The prisoners could still express themselves through whimpers and growls and tail-wagging and raised hackles — the old-fashioned ways — but they’d all moved far beyond that now.

Simmons came to within a foot of the prisoner’s cage, smiled — a little bit of spinach visible between his two top teeth — and said, “How we doin’ today? How’s my boy?”

The prisoner just stared back at him. It struck him that it might be better not to be confrontational. It would be better not to let Simmons know he suspected anything was wrong. Then again, Simmons was not stupid. Simmons knew that while the prisoner was one of the program’s failures, he still possessed a high degree of intelligence.

It was, after all, the White Coats who had designed and installed all of the prisoner’s implants. Right there, on the other side of the room, on what looked like an operating table, with a bank of lights suspended over it, and a dozen monitors on the wall beside it. These were the people who had programmed him to be so much more than just a dog — an animal with talents and abilities light years beyond what he’d come into the world with. When he was little, still just a pup, he could never have dreamt that one day he’d be able to read and understand multiple languages, analyze data, be the eyes and ears for a multi-billion-dollar secret organization.

When he was a pup, he hadn’t dreamt about much more than chasing squirrels.

The White Coats knew that while the prisoner had exceptional abilities, he was deeply flawed. Despite their best efforts, this subject was a failure. His natural instincts could not be suppressed by technology. No amount of software could overrule his canine characteristics. He was, first of all, too distractible. He could not be trusted to stay focused on the task at hand. The White Coats could send him, for example, to sniff out the location of a terrorist bomb, the lives of thousands hanging in the balance, but if he caught sight of someone tossing around a ball, he’d interrupt his mission to go and chase it.

The prisoner knew this was why the White Coats were going to do something very bad to him.

“Look what I brought you,” Simmons said, taking his left hand out of his pocket. He held something small and dark in his fingers, not much larger than a marble.

A treat.

A beefy, salty, delicious treat.

The prisoner felt his tongue slip from his mouth, running along the sides of his jaw and over his snout. It happened before he’d even realized it. They knew him so well, knew how much he liked these treats. It was one of the prisoner’s many weaknesses. They knew just how to turn him against himself.

The prisoner nearly stopped himself from looking eager for the treat, then realized that wagging his tail, which would have been his normal response, was the way to go.

Let the White Coat think he was happy.

Holding it between his thumb and forefinger, Simmons worked the treat through the chain-link grill that separated him from the prisoner.

“Come on,” Simmons said. “Bet you’ll love this. You know how much you like to gobble these down. Yum yum. They’re so delicious! I could almost eat one myself. They’re your favourite.”

The prisoner raised his head slightly, to within a few inches of the roof of his cage, and sniffed. The man wasn’t lying. This treat was definitely among his favourites. His nostrils flared ever so slightly as he took in the smell, almost tasting it.

He kept his tail wagging, but stayed pressed up against the back wall of the cage.

“What is it, sport?” Simmons asked. “You not hungry? I was hoping you might be. I’ve got lots more of these in my pocket.”

The prisoner couldn’t help but notice that Simmons’s right hand was still in his other pocket. His nostrils flared again, taking in more of the essence of the tasty morsel.

There was something wrong with it. He was sure of that now. There was something wrong with the treat.

It did not smell right.

He did not dare eat it. But if he didn’t take it, the White Coat Man would suspect the prisoner was on to him.

So he padded to the front of the cage, stretched his furry neck forward, and took the treat gingerly between his teeth.

“There ya go!” Simmons said. “Dee-licious!”

It took every bit of strength the prisoner had not to give the treat a couple of quick chews and gulp it down. But he couldn’t just let it sit there in his mouth. He had to pretend.

So he made his jaw go up and down twice, then closed his mouth, keeping the treat tucked beneath his long, wet, pink tongue. It would not take long for the treat to dissolve on its own. If he kept it in his mouth long enough for that to happen, he might as well swallow it.

Couldn’t do that.

“Starting to feel a bit sleepy there, Chip?” Simmons asked. “I suspect you will very soon.” He smiled sympathetically. “I have to tell you, this hurts me more than it hurts you, in a lot of ways. We’ve grown attached, you and I. We really have. We’ve been through a lot together. I can’t help but think about what might have been, had things worked out.”