Absolute Beginners-Book 5 Of The Mad Mad World Series

Part 3

The band had every right to be nervous about Flake's new tech. Although he looked like your average computer nerd, Jason Mills had a secret. A very big, very scary secret, taped to his stomach with surgical tape. It wasn't a bomb, but something as devastating. Something that could break through the carefully crafted web-work of shielding and bonds between the eight people that were now dead to the world asleep, something that could poke holes into their very souls and ferret out the information concealed deep in their hearts, bones and DNA.

Jason was stretched out in his bunk on one of the crew buses that sped along through the night to the next venue, typing madly away on an e-mail he'd begun earlier that evening. He was forgoing sleep to finish it but in his excitement, he didn't care. He'd been close enough to the band to get more than enough information to send along to his supervisors,and he was hopeful that while he'd been ordered to only watch the band and not interfere with them at all, that he would get a chance to see what he could get from Richard's red-headed girlfriend. She gave off an aura of something that even a blind person could have seen, and it intrigued him.

And if it came down to it, he'd gladly sacrifice himself to protect the band and her. He'd read the reports that had come from the mad doctor's files, had seen the photographs of the dead bodies, and had come across some of the man's research that if he wasn't in the job he was in, he'd have put it down to the scribblings of a madman or a science-fiction writer. He'd been present when one of his superiors had tried to question Richard when he was in the hospital recovering from his ordeal. They'd sedated him heavily; while they hadn't been able to get much from him, what he'd said was enough to give Jason more than a few nightmares. Listening to Richard recount what he'd been though was difficult enough, that he did so in a very calm voice, as if it had happened to someone else, had been worse.

Jason was quite impressed at how strongly bonded to each other the band was, how they hadn't considered the dangers to themselves and had gone to rescue Richard on their own, and how, except for a few moments of doubt and fright, seemed to accept that they were now beings out of legend as par for the course. Once the e-mail was finished and sent out, Jason crawled under his blankets and tried to go to sleep. He was excited that his hard work was finally showing some results, but at the same time he was afraid that in his efforts to find out more about the band and Lilly, he would expose himself and the organization he worked for to the world.

And that would be a very,very bad thing.