Blown Circuit Read online

  Contents

  About Blown Circuit

  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

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Title Page

  About the Author

  About Lethal Circuit

  Excerpt from Lethal Circuit

  About BROOD

  Excerpt from BROOD

  About Ghost Leopard

  Michael Chase is back.

  He survived China. Barely.

  But now he's got bigger problems.

  He has enemies. Deadly enemies.

  Coordinates broadcast on an obscure frequency have brought him to Istanbul, Turkey where credible chatter has emerged that a terrorist group plans to use a devastating device to hold the world hostage.

  Designed by Nikola Tesla, arguably the greatest inventor of the Twentieth Century, the device is experimental, it is capable, and it has been missing for almost sixty years.

  If Michael is to prevent a catastrophe, he'll need to get to the device before the Conspiracy or risk upsetting the global balance of power forever. Of course, finding the Tesla Device is one thing, knowing whom he can trust with it is another matter entirely. If Michael is to survive, he'll have to do both. If he doesn't, what started as a bad day is about to become a disaster.

  Also by Lars Guignard:

  The Circuit Thriller Series:

  Lethal Circuit: A Michael Chase Thriller

  Paranormal Mystery Series:

  Brood: A Sterling Stränge Investigation

  Middle-Grade Magic Adventure Series:

  Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure)

  Zoe & Zak and the Yogi’s Curse

  He became an infidel hesitating between two mosques.

  Turkish Proverb

  Chapter 1

  0400 BOSPHORUS STRAIT, ISTANBUL, TURKEY

  SOMETIMES A BULLET is better than a bomb. Mostly because a bullet can miss, a bomb, generally not. And that was pretty much what I was thinking when I saw the red LED counter ticking down. But I also knew that I’d come too far to abandon my mission unless I absolutely had to. And those half-inch-high numbers running down the seconds told me that I still had three minutes. Which meant that all wasn’t lost. Not quite yet. I synchronized my watch with the timer. Then I moved on.

  The old ship was musty but warm, even in the middle of the night. I had been told that the country was in the middle of a spring heat wave and so far I believed it. It was half past four in the morning and it still hadn’t cooled down enough for me to stop sweating. And I was sweating buckets now. Not just because of the bomb and the heat. But because I was close to finding my father. I reached the next cabin. The mottled-green iron door opened with a low groan, but I could quickly tell that it wasn’t the place. The cabin overflowed with stuffed cardboard boxes. Nine seconds used up. I moved on.

  Once again, the rusting cabin door hesitated before opening. Whoever had set the timers ticking meant business. I had seen proof of that. There was enough plastic explosive to light the old ship up like a firecracker. And I suspected I hadn’t seen the whole load. Anyone who wired a ship to explode would wire more than one charge. I could only hope that the charges were synchronized. If they weren’t, I was in more trouble than I thought.

  The inside of the third cabin was more promising than the others. A double berth was wedged against the wall, starched sheets pulled over the beds. I placed my hand on the lower bunk. The pillow was damp. And on the wall behind it, another timer ticked down. Two minutes and forty-one seconds left. I checked my wristwatch GPS. I was still effectively on target. If the waypoint was accurate, this was the place. But other than the bunks, the cabin was empty. I didn’t have time to linger. I moved out and down the gangway.

  There was one final door left before the catwalk ended in a steep metal stairwell. I heard a diesel engine turn over somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. Not a good sign. The engine starting up meant they aimed to move the ship. But, more urgently, it meant that there were others aboard. Not asleep in their berths, but conscious. I filed the fact away and grasped the flat door handle firmly, cautiously opening the last cabin door. I didn’t expect much, but I could tell from the moment that the heavy iron door swung open that things were different. The two metal berths had been lived in. In addition, a yellow and red scarf caught my eye.

  The scarf looked utterly out of place in the dank cabin. It was silk, Hermès if I were to guess, and it had a big brownish-red bloodstain running down the middle of it, as though the eight-hundred-dollar accessory had been used as a tourniquet. Not only that, but there were scratches on the forward steel post of the lower berth, like notches on a belt. The cabin had been used as a place of confinement. Or worse.

  Just over two minutes left. I had to be methodical. I started by snapping pictures. I used a dedicated camera, not a smartphone. I wanted good high-resolution shots. After that, I went through the bedding. First the lower bunk, then the top. There really wasn’t much there. But if my father had been anywhere on the ship, he had been there. There were men’s boots on the floor. I picked one up. His size. An eleven. And there was blood on the top sheet, right next to the pillow. Long gray hair and blood. I compartmentalized the implications and picked up a sample of the bloody hair, stowing it in my daypack.

  There had been a fight, that much was clear. A fight and a blow to the head, maybe a torn scalp. The DNA could be tested later. What mattered most was that I concentrate on checking for anything else, anything that might have caused my father to send me the coordinates of this tramp freighter moored in the middle of the Bosphorus. There were no notes, no personal possessions except the boots, no writing on the wall. I flipped open my Swiss Army knife and cut open the bottom bunk’s thin mattress, running my hand through the stuffing. Didn’t feel a thing. Then I did the same for the top mattress. Nothing there either.

  Less than two minutes left. I scoured the cabin. All I saw were rusty green iron walls and a lightbulb in a dirty frosted sconce on the wall. That was when I noticed something unusual. It was in the uneven light that the sconce was throwing. The frosted glass rested behind a
metal cage, but there was a significant blotch on one side of it. It could have been flies and dirt, or it could have been something else.

  A minute and forty seconds to go. I grasped the sconce’s rusty cage with my fingers and swung it open. But the glass shade wouldn’t come out of its housing. I didn’t have the time to fiddle with it so I picked up the leather boot and slammed it on the light shattering it. Then two things happened in quick succession. One, what looked like a ceramic medallion popped out of the shattered sconce and two, a hard fist connected with the side of my face.

  It was a good hit—strong and on its mark. And if I hadn’t leaned forward to catch the medallion just as it was thrown, the sheer power behind the punch probably would have knocked me out. I cursed myself for letting my guard down. Then I turned to meet my attacker.

  He looked like he was a sailor—a very broad, very strong Turkish sailor who was trying to figure out what I was doing on his ship. He had dark closely cropped hair and a rough, angular face with a waxy crescent-shaped scar under his left eye. And his hands were enormous—somewhere near the span of a dinner plate. I thought he was in his late thirties, and if I were to guess, he outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds, but he hadn’t let himself go to flab. That was evident by the way he held himself. The guy was in shape.

  “Hello to you too,” I said.

  Either he didn’t speak English, or I had just made him madder because he let go with a straight right. Though he was big and broad, I didn’t think he would be particularly fast. He acted more like a heavy hitter, a knockout punch kind of guy. He pulled back and threw a powerful right. I dodged the blow, but just barely, because he turned out to be a whole lot faster than I had initially reckoned. I heard the snap in his fist as it hit the airspace my head had occupied just an instant earlier.

  Ninety seconds down. Ninety to go. The guy was three feet away and acting as if we had all the time in the world. Either he didn’t know that there was a bomb on the boat, or he didn’t mind being blown sky high. Either way, I had no time for subtlety. So I feinted with a left punch followed by a quick right straight punch to his solar plexus. It didn’t connect, because he sprung to the side, but that was exactly where I wanted him. I transferred my weight to my left leg, lowered my center of gravity, and swung my hips around in an explosive roundhouse kick.

  With my left foot still firmly anchored on the ground, the ball of my right foot connected with the sailor’s center mass, propelling him into the corner of the cabin. Then, before he could react, I bolted through the cabin door. After that I took the stairs two at a time, sprinting into the night.

  Chapter 2

  MY NAME IS Michael Chase. I’m twenty-six, about six foot three, just under two hundred pounds, and a contract employee of everybody’s favorite intelligence agency, the CIA. Seven months ago, my father went missing, presumed dead. A month after that, the Agency recruited me. It wasn’t your typical recruitment; they wanted me because they had received a message from my missing father. He was their agent and they had an op they needed to run fast. The carrot for me was the fact that the op might just mean a chance to find my missing dad. I signed up and the rest was history. My recruitment was rushed, my training was accelerated, the whole thing was pushed. It could have ended badly for everyone and even worse for me. But I got through the mission, and I got a little closer to finding my lost father.

  My father’s next message had come as an NSA intercept. The folks at the National Security Agency passed it on to the CIA and then to me. Like the earlier contact, it was a pair of geographic coordinates. As soon as I’d received the message, I’d hopped on a plane, leaving Vietnam and connecting through Singapore to land at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. That was two days ago. Now I stood on the deck of an aging freighter, praying to anyone who would listen that my legs were fast enough to outrun a bomb.

  Sixty seconds and counting. The mosques of old Istanbul were bathed in the orange glow of the city before me. I needed to get to the rope ladder that I had climbed to get aboard. That ladder hung three hundred feet ahead of me on the port side of the ship. The bridge above me lit up and I heard what sounded like an electric winch. That’s when I saw her.

  She was about fifty feet away from the first of three deck cranes, standing in the shadows just beyond the light. I saw no more than her profile in silhouette. She was on the phone, talking, and that conversation clearly took precedence over me. She was slender and of medium height, and her hair, or what I could see of it, was tied up in a tight pony tail. I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was somebody else there with her, in the darkness, but before I could confirm the impression, the ship’s foghorn blasted through the night. It was followed by the crack of a bullet and a loud, guttural scream.

  I turned to see a sailor tumble through the air from the bridge above. I didn’t wait to see him land. I just ran. I knew I had a hundred yards ahead of me and if I played it right, most of it would be in the shadows. I slipped my left arm through the other strap of my daypack and zigzagged across the deck. I didn’t know who had the gun, but I had no intention of leaving myself an easy target.

  That’s when I saw an object in the middle of the deck. I had missed it coming aboard in the dark, but the thing looked like a tuning fork. A giant titanium tuning fork, approximately twenty feet high, but with three prongs instead of two. It was mounted to a pedestal, atop what resembled a large rubber mat. I didn’t have time to get a picture of it. I could see my ladder now, hanging off the side of the ship. Another bullet cracked through the night.

  I glanced behind me, but the pool of light beneath the crane was empty. The woman was gone. I pumped my legs harder as I did the math. The deck of the ship sat maybe fifty feet above the water. The ladder led down, but it also represented a static target. There was a bomb on the boat. There was no need for any kind of complex equation. I needed to get off the ship, and I needed to get off it immediately.

  A third shot rang out, even closer than the last. I had done the high jump in school. I knew how to arch my back and the rope ladder was coming up fast. A fourth shot rang out. It missed, but I knew I couldn’t stay lucky forever. So I headed directly for the railing of the ship and jumped. I placed my left hand on the rail and pushed off with my toes, using my momentum to carry me up and over the side of the vessel. As the air billowed my T-shirt, I briefly worried that I had miscalculated, that I would hit more than rough seas. But I didn’t. At least not then.

  Chapter 3

  TWENTY-THREE SECONDS left. I hit the water off the side of the freighter more or less where I calculated I would, about five feet off the bow of the boat I had used to get there. I probably went underwater ten or eleven feet. As I kicked my way to the dark surface, I knew that my next challenge was to get the boat untied and out of there, before the guy with the gun could find me. My ride was an eighteen-foot inflatable Zodiac with a rigid hull and dual Yamaha two-fifties on the stern. Lots of power, but not a lot of protection. I reached the Zodiac’s inflatable sponson and pulled myself up and over. The bowline connected to a knotted rope on the ladder by way of a stainless-steel carabiner, so I crawled forward and snapped it open.

  Eighteen seconds. Now that the inflatable was free, I already felt it drifting away from the side of the freighter. Moment of truth. I took two steps back to the center console and choked the engines before turning the key. The twin outboards started with a purr and I hit the throttle, turning in a tight, frothy turn away from the ship.

  That was when the spotlight lit me up. It didn’t come from the ship, but from a smaller boat, several hundred feet behind me. Clearly, they had been lying in wait. A megaphone called out something in garbled Turkish and I knew they wanted me to stop. Not likely. The Bosphorus was calm and I had a full five-hundred horsepower propelling me forward. If I could make it across the channel to the old city, I could disappear. Easier said than done, of course. The night sky lit up with muzzle flashes behind me and I knew my task had just grown incrementally harder.


  They were either lucky, or they knew how to aim a gun. The first shot hit the engine cowling. It shattered the plastic cover, but bounced off the block as far as I could tell. I ducked down low to the console—no need to present a bigger target than necessary. A second shot rang out, but it must have gone wide because there was no discernible impact. I was planing now, traveling quickly over relatively flat seas, but the boat with the spotlights was following and a second boat appeared out of the blackness following as well.

  I heard the crack of a large-calibre weapon and I knew that they had brought out the heavy artillery, probably some kind of Gatling gun mounted to the bow of their boat. My throttle was already matted down, so there wasn’t much more I could do to increase my speed, but I could make it harder for them to hit me. I twisted the wheel thirty degrees, putting the Zodiac up on its chines in a good solid turn. Then I twisted it back again. The Bosphorus was flat enough that I didn’t have to worry about hitting any substantial waves, though I couldn’t discount the possibility of debris in the polluted water.

  I put my pursuers out of mind and concentrated on reaching the far shore. At that moment, I considered just how far I was from America. Sure there were airbases here and there, but the nearest American ships were probably off Italy where the United States Sixth Fleet was based in Naples. It was then that I saw that the shot that I hadn’t felt had actually hit my starboard sponson. I couldn’t slow, so I ran with it, watching as the inflation tube gradually deflated. I was planing and the Zodiac had a rigid hull, so I knew I was going to stay afloat, but only if I kept her in a straight line. Any more crazy turns and I’d swamp her.

  I could see the Atatürk Bridge spanning the Bosphorus and the smaller Galata Bridge crossing the isthmus where I needed to go, but what was really bothering me was the fact that I hadn’t heard a peep out of the freighter. I checked my watch. The countdown was long over. The ship should have blown forty seconds ago. But it hadn’t and it made no sense. Was there a second timer? I didn’t complete the thought, because the crack of my pursuers’ Gatling gun wailed out again. I ducked low and saw that my port sponson had been hit. The Zodiac had three air chambers, but with two of them gone, I knew it was the beginning of the end. I estimated that I had another two minutes before I reached the Galata Bridge. The immediate shore was nearer, but not by a lot. I’d just have to hope I could make it.