Code Name Igor Read online

  Code Name Igor

  Pam Uphoff

  Copyright 2021 Pamela Uphoff

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN

  978-1-939746-73-3

  Cover Credit:

  landscape by Junnifer Baya from Pixabay

  Figure Man’s Image by Rúben Gál from Pixabay

  This is a work of fiction.

  All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Secret Agent Man

  Sunday, August 12, 3738

  Chapter Two

  The Red Headed Step Child, er, Cousin

  Monday, August 13, 3738

  Chapter Three

  Ranger's Report

  Monday, August 13, 3738

  Chapter Four

  A Novel Idea

  Friday, August 17, 3738

  Chapter Five

  A Formal Dinner

  Wednesday, November 14, 3738

  Chapter Six

  In Deep Waters

  Thursday, November 15, 3738

  Chapter Seven

  Banking on it

  Thursday, November 15, 3738

  Chapter Eight

  Domestic Doings

  Thursday, November 15, 3738

  Chapter Nine

  Labyrinth

  Thursday, November 15, 3738

  Chapter Ten

  Bad Juju

  Thursday, November 15, 3738

  Chapter Eleven

  Good Neighbors

  Friday, November 16, 3738

  Chapter Twelve

  Domestic Bliss?

  Friday, November 16, 3738

  Chapter Thirteen

  Home

  Saturday, November 17, 3738

  Chapter Fourteen

  Murder and Cows

  Monday, November 19, 3738

  Chapter Fifteen

  Research

  Tuesday, November 20, 3738

  Chapter Sixteen

  Offices and Homes

  Wednesday, November 21, 3738

  Chapter Seventeen

  Property of the Estate

  Wednesday, November 21, 3738

  Chapter Eighteen

  Does It Matter Anymore?

  Thursday, November 22, 3738

  Chapter Nineteen

  Budapest Reborn

  Friday, November 23, 3738

  Chapter Twenty

  Murder?

  Saturday, November 24, 3738

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Trashy Adventure Flick

  Wednesday, December 5, 3738

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The Rehab Center

  Sunday, December 9, 3738

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Next Steps

  Thursday, January 3, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Governor's Address

  Thursday, January 3, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Rangers

  Thursday, January 3, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Now the Men’s Turn

  Saturday, January 5, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Stuttgart

  Monday, Feb 25, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Angry Council

  Wednesday, Feb 27, 3739

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  House and Family

  Sunday, March 3, 3739

  Chapter Thirty

  Family Get Togethers

  Friday, March 22, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Who you gonna trust?

  Wednesday, May 15, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The New Reality

  Thursday, June 20, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Watching and Worrying

  Monday, September 16, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-four

  How many Soldiers did we say?

  Friday, November 1, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Forty-one Down

  Sunday, November 24, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Cyborg Orgy

  Wednesday, November 27, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Early warning

  Thursday, December 5, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Not Good

  Thursday, December 5, 3739

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Red and Brown

  Thursday, December 5, 3739

  Chapter Forty

  Search Me

  Friday, December 6, 3739

  Chapter Forty-one

  Up and At 'em

  Friday, December 6, 3739

  Chapter Forty-two

  Danger Rangers

  Sunday, December 8, 3739

  Chapter Forty-three

  Got It From Igor

  Sunday, December 8, 3739

  Chapter Forty-four

  Camping

  Wednesday, December 11, 3739

  Chapter Forty-five

  Among the Enemy

  Thursday, December 12, 3739

  Chapter Forty-six

  Baby Sitting

  Thursday, December 12, 3739

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Agent in Action

  Thursday, December 12, 3739

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Extenuating Circumstances

  Saturday, December 14, 3739

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Action!

  Wednesday, December 18, 3739

  Chapter Fifty

  Shopping

  December 21, 3739

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Siege

  December 21, 3739

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Always be Polite to Policemen

  December 21, 3739

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Hostages

  December 21, 3739

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Igor Goes To The Fair

  December 21, 3739

  Chapter Fifty-five

  The Hostess with the Mostest

  December 21, 3739

  Bonus Scene # 1

  Bonus Scene # 2

  Bonus Scene # 3

  Bonus Scene # 4

  Bonus Scene # 5

  Bonus Scene # 6

  Excerpt from Agent of the 300

  Other Titles by Pam Uphoff

  Chapter One

  Secret Agent Man

  Sunday, August 12, 3738

  Pity this poor World.

  First they had a war among their nations, then while they were exhausted and bloodied, we waltzed in through a dimensional portal and took everything.

  Or maybe I should congratulate them on getting rid of us.

  In any case, they’ve won, we’ve lost and I hope to Hell it stays that way.

  Yes, a treasonous thought. I don’t care.

  He touched his pocket. And now I’d better take these valuable samples home.

  Lord Axel Ivan Vinogradov stowed the video recorder in his bag and walked away from the people he'd been spying on.

  It was a grubby city, the tallest buildings maybe ten floors tall. Brick, old. The streets dirty, blowing trash.

  He walked briskly away from the downtown area and turned on to a street of small shops, half of them closed.

  A turn down a driveway between buildings. The key he pulled from his pocket opened the side door of the vacant shop he'd just passed.

  He was almost late but still took a quick look around, before he looked down at the tile floor in the largest room. And reached mentally to flip a switch on the dimensional beacon he’d placed in a hollow two feet ben
eath the floor. It would turn off automatically in an hour, but hopefully he’d be gone long before that. He shook out the bundle of cloth from another corner, stiff white coveralls that he pulled on over his clothing.

  Protective gear. Portal transits tended to be hard on the peripheral nervous system.

  An odd wavering light over the bar, and he pulled the hood over his head, turned the collar up so he was looking through a small slit. The light effect solidified into a circular view of a large room, a shallow ramp leading down from the edge of the portal. The man on the far side whipped his flag down. Axel tossed his bag through, then jumped. Trotted down the ramp and to the side, out of the way.

  Everything busy, modern, clean, and brightly lit.

  He shed the overalls and walked over to his boss, for this assignment. The Head of the Alliance Joint Bureaus on Siberia Max was accompanied by the red robed Inquisitor. Not the usual solo report today. They both knew I was walking into a mess. And I am so glad that the Bureau head and the Head Inquisitor get along so well. On other worlds . . .

  "This report needs to be private." He glanced at all the techs scurrying about.

  Inquisitor Gorbachev eyed him narrowly, then nodded. "Come."

  The room was small. Bare. The door swung shut with a heavy thud.

  "Tell us."

  Axel spotted a microscopic nod from his boss. "There is no Plague. There is deliberate poisoning."

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the triply bagged poisons.

  "This capsule, diluted in water, contains enough agent to remove the ability to gather power from hundreds of Mentalists. The liquid in the jar, diluted in wine, will dissolve the zivvy in the brains of anyone who drinks it for three to seven days. Use it for a month, the chip is also dissolved."

  "And Neu Frankfurt?"

  "It is lost. The rebels doped the water of the officers in every major and most of the minor military bases with the Plague. At the same time they doped the food of the Cyborged soldiers with the zivvy dissolver. In three days . . . the armies we built were the rebels’ army."

  Then he pulled the tiny AV recorder out of his pocket. "I did not have time to review what I recorded, but I may have caught the Enemy speaking to a high ranking official of their new government."

  The Inquisitor's hands clenched. "Damn. Don’t talk about this. I’ll send your acquisitions to the class five lab. I hope they can find . . . I suppose, an antidote, a counter agent." He held out a device, aimed it at the AV recorder for a moment.

  The door swung open and a tech in red entered, with tongs and a metal box.

  The tongs plucked the bag from Axel’s hand and dropped it in the box. Sealed it and departed as quietly as he’d come.

  "Good work. Now if only we could stop them." The Inquisitor waved them out.

  Axel followed his boss out. They eyed each other.

  Director Rasputin finally shrugged. "Go home. You've accrued a ridiculous amount of leave. Use it. I'll contact you if something comes up that requires your unique abilities."

  Axel nodded, and turned for the stairs. Leave. Ugh. I’ll have to spend time around my family. Or I could go camping with the Rangers and maybe take some of the younger kids along.

  A quick stop at his locker in the gym for a change into the local styles—the Russian/German that would have gotten him killed on Neu Frankfurt. Leave the AV—its memory would be completely drained—and put on the watch. Transfer the two matching pens to the new shirt pocket.

  "So are those Secret Agent pens?"

  Axel looked around. "Hey, Murph. Yep. I'm specially trained in making a style of scribbling called letters. I can make letters in patterns on paper, or walls, or anything, really. And other secret agents with the same training can do this thing called reading . . ."

  He ducked a friendly swat. Murph was a large, strong, well trained Cyborg. A soldier of the Alliance. A "Leader" variety of the military Cyborgs. One didn't ask for specifics, but Murph had such strong Mentalist talent it was obvious.

  "And you didn't bring us along to have some fun?"

  "I regret to say there was nothing to bash, smash, shoot, or blow up. It was boring."

  "Ah, poor old bored Igor. You’ll just have to sneak back into your Doomsday Cube and wait for the next time the world needs to be saved."

  “I hate those movies. Why did they have to name their hero Igor?”

  “Because of rumors about someone?” Murphy made a patting motion over his head, and walked on, grinning. He and his team of very efficient destroyers of anything or anyone they were pointed at, had the usual identification numbers of Cyborgs, but since those could be traced, they all used nicknames.

  Just like me.

  And they're probably half the reason I hate the civilian Cyborg mod that interferes with intelligence, creativity and mentalist talent. And the servant and wife chips. The pleasure girl and boy chips are horrors I prefer to not think about at all.

  And it's all so unnecessary. Historically, it was all supposed to be like the executive plates. Added memory, calculator, a data bank . . . Helpful; boosting us superior Mentalists to greater heights. Not enslaving and controlling the other ninety percent of the population.

  He shook his head and walked out.

  It was dark, here in the Mediterranean Valley. The time zone adjustment when coming in from across was always a minor irritant, although returning from Neu Frankfurt's capital city in the center of the North American Continent wasn't quite the worst World to adjust back from.

  He walked out to the start of the road down from the top of the Malta Massif—on most Worlds an isolated island in a broad sea—and from there summoned an automated cab. And had it take him to the grocery closest to his house. Partly to pick up a few things for breakfast . . . but mainly because he never used anything traceable—like a cab—to his little house. He carried the sack and walked the last few blocks.

  It was an odd house, one of a long row built onto and partially into the cliffs of the Malta Massif centuries ago, when the Alliance’s ruling 300 was persuaded that this uninhabited Ice Age World was usefully remote for experimentation.

  Nothing radical, mostly cross-breeding a lot of people sampled from worlds that they had rejected for conquest, in search of useful genes to add to the Families. Smarter, stronger, healthier, longer life span, higher Mentalist powers, but what they really wanted was Portalmakers. Something that was less random, more stable and reliable than the cloned Portalmakers they produced now.

  The project had involved a lot of genetic testing, mentalist ability testing, physical tests . . . And lots of computer time, trying to find associations between genes and abilities.

  Variations of the Portal machinery were also tested occasionally, but it was the genetics they’d concentrated on, here.

  They'd been marginally successful at concentrating the multiple genes that added up to the ability to create and stabilize dimensional portals, and steer them where their masters wanted. The researchers could now produce one portal maker out of a thousand clones. Which only sounded good if you realized the expected success rate was one in five thousand. "Fragile, easily mutated genes" according to his old teachers.

  In the course of testing and training those potential Portalmakers they also discovered quite a few previously unvisited worlds. Worlds with potential, so the support staff for the research was augmented by a business staff, to sell the portal keys, the computerized codes to steer the portals close enough to the right world that a Portalmaker could guide it to a useful place on that world. Conferring the ownership to groups that wanted to buy a world. Inevitably, a minor bureaucracy . . . that was now major . . . had sprung up. A bustling city had grown up and spread across the Mediterranean Valley.

  A city of two million people, most of whom moved here from other Alliance Worlds within the last few generations. I've got, through both my father's and my mother's lines, longer residency rights than almost anyone out there.

  Not that anyone is going t
o consider my weird mixture of ancestors worth counting. Certainly not my late mother's maternal line, and that carried over to me.

  I still get the looks, the snide remarks. Mostly from family. "His mother's half Native! I can't believe my brother married her at all, let alone presented a boy who's a quarter Native! And that he passed! He should be a chipped servant! Not a True Man!"

  Heh. And, Dear Uncle, you think you keep me on a tight leash, with the smallest stipend you could get away with. But I was already working, when Father died and you took over administering Father's Trust.

  Sometimes for the Inquisitor, sometimes with the Fast Response Teams, or Intel, like this last trip. A lot of Exploration and Research trips. We're a small mixed group up there, and we all work together instead of competing like most larger establishments. Hell, on most Worlds we'd have four or more separate buildings and four times the staff and bureaucrats. And I'd be stuck in one unvarying job and bored to tears.

  I even varied my routine by fixing up this house I bought completely outside the Trust. It was just under the amount a Young Mentalist was allowed to own personally. All of which I somehow failed altogether to inform you of, Dear Uncle Vladimir, when my father died. And you took control of my Trust, and became my official mentor. And unofficial tormentor.

  Which is why this place feels like home, even though, on record, I'm living in the Historically Important Vinogradov House, a poorly designed overgrown mansion, under the control—he thinks—of Lord Vladimir Vinogradov.

  And pretending to be a leech and a playboy.

  Damn this culture, where everyone but the lords are property, brain chipped and controllable. And even the young Lords still under the thumb of their father or Head of Family until they’re fifty years old. Three months. Just three more months. November fifteen, year of our Lord thirty-seven thirty-eight and I will be free.

  He carried his groceries up the steps beside the garage doors to the front door. The security system recognized the signal from his watch, then double-checked through the security cams and their facial recognition program. The locks clicked and he nudged the door open with his hip, stepped through, and shoved it closed with a kick.

  "Home again. What fun." Also a coded message to the security system, telling it that there were no known problems.

  This level held a moderate sized living room, a dining room, and kitchen. All open to each other.