Biohack Read online

  Biohack

  A High-Tech Conspiracy Thriller

  J.D. Lasica

  A Shadow Operatives Thriller (Book 1)

  Contents

  Praise for ‘Biohack’

  Free bonus download

  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

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Characters

  Help an author out

  Hacked Celebrity Files

  Book 2: Catch and Kill

  Fact vs. fiction

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for ‘Biohack’

  “Biohack blew me away. More than an action- adventure book that should be made into a movie, this is a memorable, brilliant, and important book.”

  – Shel Israel, author of The Fourth Transformation

  “J.D. Lasica’s searing biopunk novel Biohack is the Dan Brown meets Lara Croft meets Michael Crichton thriller we’ve been waiting for. Kaden is one smart, kick-ass heroine.”

  – Saul Tanpepper, author of the thriller series Gameland

  “Biohack is a fast-paced, action-packed thriller, and J.D. Lasica is a threat to a good night's sleep. First, you'll stay up late reading; then you'll stay up contemplating Biohack 's chilling message.”

  – Melissa F. Miller, author of the thrillers Dark Path and Critical Vulnerability

  “Fantastic! It's like a summer-blockbuster action flick with a brain. A techno-ethical tour de force!!!” ★★★★★

  – Denise Howell, host, This Week in Law podcast

  “Biohack is the perfect thriller for our anxious age when biology has become hackable and the future of our species hangs in the balance.”

  – Jamie Metzl, former NSC official and author of Eternal Sonata and Genesis Code

  “A high-tech thriller with a cool, modern protagonist. I couldn't put it down!”

  – Kira Dineen, host, DNA Today podcast

  “This smart and gripping thriller starts off with a bang and just keeps getting better! Well-drawn characters and heart- stopping action combine to make Biohack an adrenaline rush of excitement you won’t want to miss!”

  – Chris Patchell, author of the thrillers Dark Harvest and Vow of Silence

  “An excellent futuristic thriller with detailed science and thrilling action. Don't miss this summer read!”

  – Nicholas Sansbury Smith, author of Hell Divers, Trackers and Orbs

  “We need more thrillers like Biohack . Lasica knows his tech, and he makes the genomics revolution as harrowing as the Wild West. With crisp prose and viscerally imagined technology, this is a book you'll want to pick up!”

  – J.B. Simmons, author of The Babel Tower and The Omega Trilogy series

  “A read you won't want to put down from beginning to end! Super original and engaging.” ★★★★★

  – Janet Fullwood, entrepreneur/journalist

  Note to readers : If you need to get your bearings, see the Characters section after the final chapter.

  Copyright © 2018 by J.D. Lasica. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Biohack is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights holders retain the rights to their trademarks and copyrights. Any references to historical figures, real people, or real places are used fictitiously.

  Published in the United States of America by Best of Indie Publishing on May 17, 2018.

  Editor: Katrina Diaz Arnold

  Cover design: Damonza

  Ordering info for college classes or business use:

  (925) 600-7641

  Dedicated to every woman who resists and every survivor who perseveres.

  “Your children are not your children.

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. …

  You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.”

  – Kahlil Gibran, “On Children” from The Prophet

  “If scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will be no stopping the public from happily seizing them.”

  – James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix

  Free bonus download

  Join the author’s Best of Indie Readers’ Circle (email newsletter) and he’ll send you the Hacked Celebrity Files—a key plot twist in Biohack that will blow your mind.

  Get the files for free:

  bit.ly/celebrityfiles

  1

  The Vatican, August 5

  T he three dark figures skimmed across the cold marble floor of St. Peter’s Basilica. Kaden raised her eyes to Michelangelo’s majestic dome, challenging the stares of the saints overhead. She genuflected, crossed herself, and smiled.

  “Score one for the damned,” she whispered.

  Kaden led Bundt and Nico into the confessional, where the advance team had stashed uniforms of the sampietrini , the Vatican work crew. They changed and found the door at the south wall of the basilica that led down to the Roman necropolis.

  Kaden inserted the first pass key into the latch and the heavy wooden door groaned open.

  The operatives eased down the steep concrete stairway through layers of history, moving past exposed masonry and the ponderous walls of the original fourth-century basilica. They circled downward, twisting through claustrophobic stone passages.

  Kaden was the first to reach the basement chamber. She spotted the squat, decrepit stone structure that served as the entryway to the netherworld below.

  She put her spelunking
skills to use. She fastened a titanium grappling hook to a secure lip of the well-like shaft and tossed the long knotted rope into the dark hole. She grabbed the edge, tugged at the rope, and climbed down, descending deftly through the ancient vertical tunnel. A bright blade of light from the LED mini-flashlight wedged above her ear showed a dirt floor twenty feet below. She rappelled down and dropped the final few feet to the ground.

  Bundt followed, and then Nico. They emerged into a world from another time.

  Kaden advanced a few feet on the hard dirt floor onto a remarkably smooth cobblestone passageway in shades of faded ochre and gray. She led the two men through a semicircular tunnel lined with chestnut-colored brick walls on both sides. She turned up the intensity on her flashlight to brighten the pathway and saw they were in an ancient burial chamber. Carved into the walls were rows of long-buried Roman mausoleums.

  “This is it,” she whispered. “Roman Street of the Dead.” She gave a quick military gesture with her left hand.

  They moved forward through the deathly silence, past elegant redbrick burial houses that had a surreal freshness to them, as if the tombs had been built two years ago, not two millennia. Low-slung gabled roofs rose over the columned doorways of Roman family vaults.

  She peered inside the nearest tomb and flashed her light. Inside were marble sarcophagi, cremation urns, stucco statues of Egyptian and Greco-Roman gods, prancing Pans, leering satyrs—a bacchanalian free-for-all.

  She glanced behind at Bundt, who pressed his lips into a half-smile. He seemed in his element down here, with his wide-set eyes and terse, pulled-back features that gave his face a slightly skeletal look. He drew his gun, an odd move given that the Vatican security force rarely patrolled belowground.

  “Creepy as shit,” Nico said, taking in the long row of crypts.

  This was the third job she’d taken him on, but it was by far the weirdest. She loved putting her covert ops skills to the test against big challenges and long odds, but after she got back to base she wanted some answers. What the hell am I doing in the bowels of the Vatican on this crazy-ass mission? For now, she set those doubts aside. Today she would make damn sure her team succeeded.

  Kaden aimed her light to the left, up the gentle slope, and began moving through the subterranean cavern. After a minute she dropped to one knee to orient herself at the entrance of a low-slung brick tomb. She took out her Eyewear and slid it through her wispy blond hair tinged with purple. Combined with her wiry physique, her short cuts sometimes made people mistake her for a young man, which didn’t bother her a bit.

  She skimmed her light across the ceiling and spotted an ancient mosaic of Christ as the Sun God, tunic flowing, ascending to heaven in a chariot drawn by white horses. This tracked precisely with the augmented reality map of the excavations provided by Contact’s advance team.

  “Pretty sight, you down on one knee,” Bundt murmured, nudging his Sig Sauer P226 up her thigh and between the cheeks of her too-small hip-hugging uniform.

  She turned, temper flaring. For most of her twenty two years, she’d put up with SOBs like Bundt making judgments about her looks, her gender, her very identity. Their assumptions were wildly off base. Just like all the others, she thought.

  Kaden rose to face him. “Want to join them?” she said, nodding toward the row of crypts.

  Bundt retreated with a grunt and a scowl.

  The guy was a last-minute addition to the team, a bit of a wildcard, and she hadn’t had time to vet him. She decided she’d deal with him later. Contact’s orders were clear: Retrieve the bones—let nothing else get in the way.

  They continued through the brick-lined tunnel and soon entered a small courtyard where a narrow alleyway rose to the right. Kaden’s flashlight glinted off the faded plaster of the Red Wall—Peter’s bones, she knew, were on the other side.

  Near the end of the alley they found the spiral metal staircase and ascended to the underground chapel, sitting just below the high altar. She used the second key.

  Nico, her tech lead, flicked on his infrared headset, and they entered. At one end of the small, rectangular chapel stood the stone remains of Constantine’s ancient pedestal shrine. On the far wall, just opposite the shrine, was a door that led up to the Confessio, the sunken area in front of the high altar. In front of that door, Nico reported, were two electronic sensing devices: a pair of infrared beams and a microwave motion sensor.

  “Looks like the Church has gone high tech,” Nico mused. “Okay, keep still.”

  Nico set his bag on the floor and pulled out a small black box—a microwave transmitter—pre-adjusted to the right frequency by Contact’s advance team. Nico aimed it at the motion detector and activated the switch to flood the signal.

  “You can move now,” Nico told the others. “Nothing too sudden. Keep your distance from the far door.”

  Kaden saw that the infrared beams were set up so no one could enter through that door without setting off the alarm. The security system appeared to have been set up to prevent a break-in from the basilica above, not from the Roman necropolis below.

  “This way.” Kaden led her team past Constantine’s shrine, its slabs of porphyry sparkling a brilliant shade of dark purple in the glimmer of flashlights. She ducked through a jagged hole in the wall, shimmied through a cramped passageway, and came to a walled-in chamber .

  This was it: the repository.

  Through the bars of a heavy bronze-grill gate, her headset light trembled against the mottled blue-white wall tomb. The wall flickered with jumbles of Latin graffiti inscribed by early Christian pilgrims. Below the scrawlings, barely five feet from them, was a small cavity hollowed out of the wall, covered with a glass pane. The tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.

  “Stand clear.” Nico went to work with his battery-powered reciprocating saw.

  To Kaden, in the stillness of the chapel, the whirrr seemed deafening. The high-speed carbon blade made short work of the bronze gate. After three minutes, the opening was big enough for them to slip through the broken bars.

  They crouched in front of the small window of the repository. The bones seemed to glow in their transparent plexiglass containers, nineteen small boxes in all, with fragments of Peter’s femurs, tibias, and mandibles resting on white foam rubber.

  Nico drew out a glove and a tube of liquid nitrogen. He aimed the nozzle and sprayed the bulletproof glass in quick, even bursts. The polycarbonate plastic pane frosted up. He waited several seconds. Then he smashed the window with a brick he’d grabbed.

  Kaden, Bundt, and Nico grabbed the boxes and stashed them in three cloth satchels. Then they retraced their steps through the bronze-grill gate opening, through the thin passageway, and back into the ancient subterranean chapel. Nico turned off the microwave transmitter and placed it into the bag. Kaden opened the door to the necropolis—then stopped.

  They heard the distant sound of footsteps clattering across stone steps.

  Kaden stared into the dark stairway, then closed and locked the door. There were two ways out of here. The way they came, or up the stairway leading to the high altar, through the heavy wooden doors at the chapel’s far end .

  “Can’t go that way.” Nico nodded toward the door on the far side of the room. “You’ll trip the alarm.”

  Bundt checked his gun’s magazine. “They already know we’re here.”

  The door handle to the necropolis began to twist back and forth.

  “He’s right,” Kaden said. “Let’s move.”

  The three of them bolted across the room, tripping the infrared beams. She heard the distant sound of an alarm.

  “Do your thing,” Kaden said to Nico.

  He crouched and began to jimmy the antique lock on the heavy Confessio door. Behind them, the necropolis door handle lurched violently.

  Nico cursed and slammed his hand against the door. “Not opening.”

  Kaden grabbed the reciprocating saw from the tool bag and moved Nico aside. The blade came alive, and she began cu
tting through the sturdy hardwood door. Within thirty seconds she’d sliced a ragged semi-circle around the bolt lock. She threw her shoulder into the door and heaved it open. She dropped the saw to the ground and retrieved her pouch of boxed bones.

  “Let’s go!” she said.

  Kaden, Bundt, and Nico scrambled up the double flight of centuries-old marble stairs, the air thick with incense from the votive lamps atop the metal railings.

  They exited the stairway and leaped down the three short steps into the basilica’s vast open space. She felt the weight of the basilica press down on them. She glanced at the wording that circled the base of the dome: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church and give you the keys to heaven.”

  They dashed, saints glaring, across the marble floor to the south side of the basilica.

  Kaden found the exit and they plunged into the courtyard. She activated her Eyewear and spoke with an efficient calmness. “Vanderhorst. Extraction. Now.”

  They tore through the night, through lawns and hedge-lined gardens, past the ministerial-looking Government Palace, and headed toward the heliport landing pad at the west end of Vatican City. Behind them, beyond a row of yucca trees, Kaden heard a frenzy of shouts and the sound of boots on pavement keeping pace.

  They reached the wall of a fortified tower. Kaden slowed to scan it with her headset. This wasn’t the planned escape route, but it could work. The heliport was around the corner to the right, perhaps 100 yards away. She led Bundt and Nico down the stone walkway that skirted the tower’s flank.

  As Kaden turned the corner, a Swiss guard blindsided her from behind a statue, knocking her flat with the back of his elbow and sending her headset flying. He loomed over her, metal breastplate flashing, and pointed his long, steel-pointed spear toward her throat.

  Stunned for a moment, she grabbed the ancient-looking weapon with both hands, yanked the guard downward, regained her footing, and with one seamless pirouette delivered a forceful side kick combo to the side of his metal helmet as she regained her feet.

  She followed with three quick jabs to his body and face with the blunt end of the spear, then used a whipsaw roundhouse kick to deliver a blow that knocked his helmet off and sent him sprawling to the pavement. Now that he lay dazed and barely moving, she saw he was even younger than she was.