Erased by Jordan Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

thing. It would keep her there until she ultimately attracted their attention. The best thing she could do was make her move now, and hope they didn’t recognize her.
    Sara put on her best poker face and walked right up to the line of cops. She was terrified. What if they asked what she was doing there? Sara didn’t even have an excuse. Shopping, she thought anxiously. I was just shopping officer, and then the fire alarm went off.
    One of the cops guarding the front doors looked Sara up and down and then twisted aside to make room. She smiled awkwardly and walked by. The door handle was cold to the touch, and impossibly heavy. Sara felt like Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill as she put her weight against the door and forced it open. She almost didn’t have the strength for it.
    Then she was outside. Warm sunlight splashed down on her face. The roar of the city filled her ears like music. Sara took a deep breath and stepped into the crowd.
    Fifteen minutes after waking up on the roof, she was free. The first thing she did was call Scott. She dialed his cell phone. A woman answered: “Bueno?”
    Sara hung up, and then dialed again. The same voice answered. “Buenos dias?”
    “I’m sorry… I don’t understand. Is Scott there?”
    “No Entiendo? No hablo ingles.”
    Sara looked at her phone. She’d dialed the right number. Maybe Scott’s phone had been disconnected. Had she forgotten to pay the bill? No, that didn’t make sense. They wouldn’t give his number away that fast. Would they?
    Sara hung up and dialed their home number. A pleasant female voice said, “We’re sorry, but this line has been disconnected.” Sara’s chest tightened. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 10
     
     
     
    Stryker managed to continue pacing even as the truck wound its way through downtown traffic. Once they got past the square, he instructed the driver to circle around in a one-mile perimeter. He wanted to be closer, but traffic was too heavy.
    Five minutes after the assassination, Stryker started to get nervous. He was waiting for confirmation of Sara Murphy’s arrest. It should have happened within minutes. “Chaz, what’s going on? Why don’t I have an update?”
    Chaz was one of the techs, the one with green hair and a nose ring. Stryker didn’t care much for him. Standards were lax when it came to the field techs. The OSS couldn’t afford to turn them away. It wasn’t a job that just anyone could do. They needed people that could do a very challenging and specialized job, and keep their mouths shut about it, too. They needed a certain moral compliancy . The OSS often operated under questionable legal and ethical circumstances.
    Then there was Lisa. She was normal at least. Stryker was inclined to like her, if for no better reason than she reminded him of his third wife. Brunette, big eyes, big hips. She was his kind of girl. Young, though. Lately they’d all started looking too young. He was getting old.
    Chaz adjusted the dials on his scanning equipment and listened intently through his too-large headphones. He looked ridiculous in those things. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of crosstalk. Somebody set off a fire alarm.”
    “Shit. That was Murphy.”
    “How do you know?” said Lisa.
    “Because I know her. Did you kids even read her file? She was a valedictorian. She earned a scholarship that covered everything but toothpaste. She had job offers from a dozen law firms before she even graduated.”
    “None of that should matter,” said Chaz. “She was under PHS. She was a highly reliable subject.”
    PHS stood for post-hypnotic suggestion. It was a very effective process for molding the psyche of a person like Sara Murphy. Chaz used the term loosely, though. In this case, it meant the sum of the techniques that had gone into Sara’s programming, including hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, torture, and repetitious suggestion. The programming was supposed to