Hazel called everyone down to the lab. She turned on the projector that attached to a magnifying camera and showed her findings on the large screen. It might be a creepy biohazard lab, but it did have excellent camera equipment.
On the screen, she pointed to the small piece of what she believed to be plastic. It held a hint of red. The plastic had probably absorbed some rust from the lake bed, discoloring the item.
She then used the camera to show the scalpel cut grooves in each of the skulls. Many of the cuts showed signs of healing, indicating the subject was alive when the cut had been made.
“So you think someone performed surgery, implanting something behind the right ear?” Alec asked.
“I do. My guess is it’s a chip of some sort, but we’ll need more than a tiny fragment to be certain.”
Isabel touched behind her ear. Her eyes held a haunted look. “What would that do?”
“There could be any number of things, but given the consistent placement of the groove, it could relate to hearing, with wires that stimulated the cochlea or auditory nerve. A transmitter of some sort.”
Isabel frowned. “Or a translator,” she said softly.
“What do you mean?” Alec asked.
“Not a language translator, a sound wave translator. Or…an infrasound translator.” She continued to rub the spot behind her ear. “I don’t remember much from…my experience in Alaska, but there was one conversation they let me remember. It had to do with the timing of being zapped, or maybe it was the frequency. It’s all a little fuzzy. But the thing I do remember is they wore masks, and I was told it was because the mask translated their speech into a sound wave I could hear and understand when they were zapping me. It could be bullshit, the masks could have been worn just to be disorienting and scary, but…I don’t think so. They were pretty specific and changed their voices even when I wasn’t being subjected to infrasound waves.”
“So it’s possible Westover was working with masks,” Keith said. “While in Virginia, they were perfecting the technology to deliver infrasound without the need for a big, bulky mask.”
“With a transmitter, they could dial in on a victim,” Alec said. “Focus the sound wave right on them so no one else would feel the effects. Hell, they could use an implant to trigger nausea and vertigo. And they wouldn’t need to wear masks to deliver orders in public.”
“Manchurian candidate,” Matt said softly.
“Chase,” Isabel said.
Hazel stared at the skull before her. “We need to look for a scar behind Chase’s ear.”
As one, they stood and headed to the door. Sean locked the room behind them. No one had the patience for the elevator, and they ran up the three flights of stairs to the medical clinic, where Chase Johnston was asleep and still handcuffed to a bed.
The medic examined Chase at Alec’s request, while everyone else waited outside the room. After a moment, Alec stepped to the door, his face blank. “Hazel?” He nodded toward the hospital bed, and she stepped into the room.
“Take a look,” Alec said. “We need your opinion.”
She paused to look at the man on the bed. Chase was pale, his skin slack with slumber. The monitor showed a strong heartbeat. She wasn’t a medical doctor, but she’d taken classes after earning her PhD to have a better understanding of how the skeletal system worked with the other systems of the body in life.
She grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the box on the counter and slipped them on before approaching the bed. Before touching him, she turned to the medic. He nodded his permission, and she turned Chase’s head slightly to get a better view of the area behind his right ear. The scar, if it was there, would be just above the hairline. She ran her fingers over Chase’s short hair and felt the hard ridge of a scar, even through the latex.
She let out a soft gasp and reached for the magnifying goggles in the holder mounted to the wall along with the sphygmomanometer and stethoscope. She flipped on the high-powered light above the lenses and examined the spot behind his ear up close. She could see the space between individual hairs and the puckered skin of a suture scar.
She stood and flipped off the light. “The FBI will want to shave the spot and take photos. But yeah. He’s been cut there. Same place. The length of the cut is what I would expect on the skin’s surface, longer than the groove in the bone.”
“Westover didn’t do that to him,” Alec said. “He was thoroughly examined, X-rayed, MRIed, you name it, after what happened in Alaska. When he was medically cleared to work for Raptor again, we were given his records. If he’d had a chip in his head, we’d have known. He’d have known.”
“It appears someone picked up the testing where Westover left off, after Chase started working for Raptor again.”