Mosaic (Breakthrough Book 5)

by Michael C. Grumley

  “What do you think that means?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe nothing. I’m not exactly clearheaded at the moment.”

  “True. Still no Sally though.”

  “She takes a little longer lately.”

  “I guess pregnancy will do that.” Chris peered closer at his video feed on the monitor. “Do you recognize any of the others?”

  Using her hands, Alison slowly spun herself around, her eyes following several more dolphins circling nearby. “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.” She reached out and let her fingers run the length of one of the dolphins, prompting it to roll to one side. It was a female, evident by the two slits below her belly. The creature seemed familiar but moved too fast for Alison to recognize any distinct features or scars.

  “I think this one–” Alison stopped in midsentence. “Wait a minute.”

  “What is it?”

  Alison didn’t reply. Instead, she quickly rotated back around, as if listening.

  “Do you hear something?” asked Chris.

  “No,” she whispered. “I feel something.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure. A tingling.”

  “Must be their echolocation.”

  Alison remained frozen, squinting past Dirk and the others into the darkness below. “I don’t think so. This…feels different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know.” Alison peered down at her hands, then down at her suit and equipment. “It feels similar but not quite the same.” She knew humans could feel the tingling of a dolphin’s echolocation; she’d felt it many times. But this was definitely different. It almost felt like a change in tone or frequency, although much subtler and not detected through her ears. This she felt through her skin.

  Alison continued staring, feeling the sensation grow stronger. She was about to speak when she saw something emerge from below and into the dim, shimmering light. It was one of the elders.

  This dolphin, she recognized. It was the one she had spoken to recently. The one with lighter and much older skin, covered in wrinkles and scrapes.

  The elder rose through the water and slowed to a near stop just a few feet away. Like all dolphins, its curved mouth resembled a slight grin as his familiar dark eyes studied her.

  You back, Alison.

  IMIS’s mechanical voice sounded, making the elder sound exactly like Dirk and Sally. But if the voice and tone were the same, the timing of its speech seemed slightly different. Slower. Perhaps more purposeful. Or was she imagining that?

  Alison nodded.

  You answer.

  “Uh, no. Not yet.”

  Why?

  “I need to speak. To more humans.”

  Why?

  Alison struggled to answer and looked closer at the elder’s eyes. They were unflinching. “I…I’m not a head.” She opened her mouth to continue but quickly shut it again with a look of puzzlement. It was still there. The tingling. But why was the elder still using echolocation? Or whatever it was?

  “You okay, Ali?” Chris asked.

  She paused her vest again. “I still feel it.”

  “The buzzing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Alison frowned sarcastically inside of her mask. “Really?”

  “Sorry,” Chris continued watching the elder through Alison’s camera. “Why would he be using it that close?”

  “I don’t know,” Alison said, turning to look behind her. “Is he looking for something behind–”

  How you long?

  She tilted her head, trying to understand before IMIS corrected the translation and repeated it.

  How long?

  “How long for what?”

  How long for head?

  Alison’s eyes widened. Even though it was a perfect translation, she never heard it. Instead, she suddenly realized where the tingling was coming from.

  By turning slightly, she could sense a direction as the sensation met her skin. It wasn’t coming from the elder. There was something beside him, and farther back, still hidden in the darkness.

  She paused again and lowered her voice this time. “Uh…Chris.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something else here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever this…frequency is, it’s not coming from him. It’s coming from something else. Behind him.”

  “Can you see it?”

  “No, it’s too far. I need you to try.” Alison twisted, centering her chest. “Use the camera.”

  Chris leaned forward, studying his screen. “Um…I don’t know how.”

  “Zoom in with the camera,” Alison said calmly, her voice still low.

  Chris grabbed the computer mouse and clicked in and out of windows, looking for anything that looked like camera controls. “How? How do you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Lee always did it before. You don’t see anything?”

  Chris shook his head, still clicking feverishly. “Nothing. Nothing that looks like a zoom. Christ, would it kill him to put some icons on this damn program?!”

  Beneath the water, Alison frowned and finally turned her attention away from the darkness below her. The elder was still floating nearby, using only a slight twisting movement from his front flippers.

  Neither he nor Dirk was saying a word.

  13

  Lee Kenwood studied his computer screen one more time, looking for errors. The parity checks were good, and when all was said and done, they had only two hard drives go bad as a result of the move. Fortunately, both were in different servers and part of redundant sets, so there was no permanent harm done.

  He turned and glanced at Will Borger, still seated behind him. “Okay, all systems are good. IMIS is back online!”

  “Great job, kid. I’m almost done with the sat link. Then you can call Alison to test it.”

  A few minutes later, Borger finished and saved his settings, then launched the command to establish the connection. He watched the process tunnel through Arecibo’s internal network until it reached one of the outer DVB modems.

  Borger shook his head. “They really need to improve the security on this network. Whoever is in charge of this should be fired.”

  After another minute, his screen reported a successful connection. “All right, give it a whirl,” he said just as his cell phone chimed, followed immediately by yet a different alarm from his laptop. Borger picked up the phone and studied it curiously before turning to his laptop.

  “Something wrong with the connection?” Lee asked.

  “No. This is something else.”

  After verifying his own connection to the outside world, Lee nodded and turned around again, only to find Borger staring grimly at his screen. After a long silence, he spoke up. “Something wrong?”

  Will Borger’s expression did not change. He took a deep breath, folding his arms before raising a hand up over his mouth.

  “What is it?”

  It took the older Borger several more seconds to answer. “It’s from one of the custom apps I wrote. Designed to scan a group of systems and alert me if it notices something.”

  “Did it notice something?”

  Borger nodded.

  Lee waited until Borger finally looked up at him. “Someone has identified my satellite phone, and is trying to use its transmitting signal to triangulate the phone’s location.”

  “What?!”

  Borger frowned and continued studying his screen.

  “So, someone is trying to find you?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Will they be able to?”

  “Eventually. Triangulating is a difficult process but not impossible. I did it myself to find General Wei’s phone in China––from cell towers, which are faster and more accurate. Triangulating a satellite phone will take more time, but it can be done.”

  “How accurate is it?”

  He shrugged. �
�From satellites, maybe down to a mile or so. But there’s not a lot of hiding places out here on the outskirts of the observatory. It won’t take long.” Borger’s face was stern. “We’d better test IMIS and get the hell out of here.”

  ***

  When Alison’s phone rang, Chris Ramirez was already frantically looking for it. He found the source of the familiar ringtone on the small table behind him, apparently having slid off and onto the far side of one of Lee’s technical manuals. Chris snatched the device and hit the answer button. “This is Chris!”

  “Chris? What are you doing there?”

  “Lee! I’m here with Alison. How the hell do you zoom the camera on her vest?!”

  “When did you get there?”

  “The camera, Lee! It’s important.”

  “Uh, you have to type it in manually. On the CCD01 screen. I haven’t created an interface for it yet.”

  “No kidding,” Chris replied. “Okay. I’m on the window. What now?”

  “Type move near zoom max 5.”

  Chris typed the text and hit enter. In a separate window, the video feed from Alison’s camera suddenly zoomed in. “Hold on!” Chris said, putting the phone down. “Ali,” he barked into the mike. “I’ve zoomed in, but I still don’t see anything.”

  “Go closer!”

  Chris grabbed the phone again. “Lee! We need to zoom more.”

  “Just type the command again.”

  “Okay!” Again, Chris dropped the phone. A moment later, the camera zoomed in further but revealed nothing in the dark water below her. “Still not seeing anything, Ali. And the picture is starting to get grainy.”

  “Okay. Then ask Lee how to record this.”

  This time Chris pressed the phone’s speaker button. “Lee, how do we record this video?”

  “It’s already recording, Chris. It does it by default.”

  “Alison–”

  “Yeah, I heard him. If it’s already recorded, then I’m coming back up.”

  “Okay. I’ll meet you at the stern.” Chris turned and reached for the phone to end the call. “Lee, we’ll call you back!” With that, he jumped up and disappeared through the ship’s small, metal doorway.

  On the other end, a perplexed Lee looked at his own phone after the call went dead. “Well, that was weird.”

  ***

  Less than thirty minutes later, Lee’s phone rang again.

  “Lee, it’s Chris. Sorry. Things got a little exciting over here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. More surprises from our dolphin friends. I’ll tell you about it later. What’s up?”

  “I thought you were still in the hospital. When did you get to the Pathfinder?”

  “Earlier this morning. Where are you?”

  Lee looked directly at Borger, sitting quietly in their dimly lit room, still studying his own screen. “Uh, that’s kind of hard to explain too. But IMIS is back online, and I need you and Alison to help test it.”

  “Okay, sure. Give us ten minutes, and we’ll call you back.”

  14

  “She’s dead.”

  CIA Director Andrew Hayes instinctively pressed the phone tighter against his ear and straightened in his seat. “Who?”

  “Reinhard. Our unrelenting activist.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” the voice of Hayes’ deputy answered. “Just confirmed. Someone slipped poison into her cigarette.”

  Hayes couldn’t help but grin. The irony served as a nod to Director Hayes himself, who was an agent decades ago––when the CIA tried desperately and repeatedly to assassinate Fidel Castro under its famed Operation Mongoose. Conceived by both President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, the attempts to kill the communist leader by any means possible gave way to dozens of creative, and sometimes outlandish, ideas to end the Cuban president’s life. One idea put forth by a young agent Hayes was to poison one of Castro’s cigars. It was promptly rejected as being too difficult. It was ironic, given that none of the CIA’s many attempts would ever prove successful.

  Nevertheless, someone in the agency remembered and used his idea. As a silent joke.

  Hayes leaned onto his right elbow, his gaze passing through the window as his town car inched its way south, down the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Even at midday, the traffic was thick, and Hayes’ black Lincoln Continental, driven by his trusted driver, moved slowly forward.

  “Good,” Hayes finally said with approval. “It was long overdue.”

  “Agreed,” Ambrose said.

  Ria Reinhard was a proverbial pain in the ass as far as the two men were concerned. An activist at UNICEF, Reinhard simply could not be convinced to shut up. No matter how strong the threat, she would not be deterred in her attacks on the CIA over their handling of the Osama bin Laden matter in Abbottabad.

  Much of the public knew about the capture and death of bin Laden. The assassination culminated from an exceptionally intense mission of information gathering. One that would prove to have a myriad of ramifications for not just the rest of Pakistan, but the entire Middle East.

  Thanks to bin Laden’s personal courier, the CIA was finally confident as to the location of the terrorist’s hideout. But before a full-scale raid could be launched, U.S. intelligence had to be certain it was, in fact, him. Their ruse, which proved extremely effective, was to use a respected Pakistani doctor to conduct a fake Hepatitis B vaccination drive throughout the city.

  Beginning in the poorest area of town to establish credibility, Dr. Shakil Afridi systematically moved from child to child. He had administered the alleged immunization, which was nothing of the sort. In reality, the injections served as the means of collecting blood samples from which U.S. intelligence eventually confirmed the genetic signatures of Osama bin Laden’s children. Only then were they sure as to whom the secret compound was hiding.

  Yet it was not the raid itself to which Ria Reinhard had objected but rather the CIA’s lies surrounding the mock immunization. For decades, UNICEF’s singular mission had been as simple as it was unswerving: to save as many children as possible by providing essential health care, immunizations, food, and clean water––in areas of the world where none existed.

  And they had. Through their relentless efforts, UNICEF was responsible for saving the lives of more young children on the planet than any other health organization. And while Ria Reinhard had never questioned the importance of finding and killing bin Laden, what she found beyond abhorrent was how the CIA finally did it. Lies that had been based on an immunization of which people in impoverished countries were already leery. Rumors had been rampant for years over dark organizations planning to secretly sterilize Muslim children through the use of immunizations. And now that the CIA had been exposed as a poster child for such deception, they had made UNICEF’s job even more difficult overnight.

  Now the poor were too horrified and frightened to trust anyone, even UNICEF doctors. And the resulting deaths quickly began to mount again. To Ria Reinhard, it was not what the CIA had done, it was how they had done it. The deception that finally got bin Laden captured was now killing tens of thousands of people, those too fearful of what might really be in those needles.

  Many argued that the end justified the means, especially given what a dangerous man bin Laden was. While others argued that no amount of justification was worth the deaths of twenty thousand innocent children.

  What Reinhard demanded was change. Change in how a secret organization like the CIA could operate with such impunity, anywhere in the world they wished, and with no accountability to anyone. What she wanted was change…or at the very least, a public acknowledgment by the CIA that there were repercussions to their unbridled power and secrecy.

  In the end, she got neither.

  Hayes relaxed and leaned back into the car’s black leather seat. For him, it was more than just a matter of national security. Much more. For Hayes, it was about power. Pure unadultera
ted power. In a world of cowards who were too timid or weak to wield it.

  He reached into his inside jacket pocket and withdrew a cigarette. “What else?” he asked, before subconsciously moving the butt toward his lips. Suddenly realizing the irony, he stopped and studied it closer before reluctantly placing it back in his pocket.

  “I have more good news,” Ambrose said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “We’ve narrowed the Chinese girl’s location down to the island of Trinidad.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “An operative found someone who witnessed the girl being transferred ashore, evidently unconscious. From a fishing trawler. By a young captain known to be a local smuggler.”

  “Where on the island?”

  “We’re not sure yet. But we’ll find out. We’ve got multiple operatives on the ground now. And we’re still trying to crack their satellite phones. Whatever they’re using to encrypt those devices is proving damn effective. It may be Whisper Systems or something similar.”

  “Wonderful,” Hayes replied sarcastically.

  “We’ve also been looking into the biological samples you mentioned. Aboard the Pathfinder. But nothing at all on those yet.”

  Hayes sighed. “Okay, keep looking. They’re there. I’m sure of it.”

  “Will do. Ready for the bad news now? The House Intelligence Committee is requesting your testimony over what happened to that kid in Afghanistan.”

  “Christ,” Hayes muttered. They were never going to let this go. The damn politicians were worse than the public. Utterly incapable of understanding that some goals were impossible without resorting to unconventional means. Even if it meant occasionally fighting alongside the same terrorists you were tasked with destroying.

  “When?” asked Hayes.

  “Three weeks.”

  “Schedule something important for me to attend and stall.”

  “Already working on it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait,” replied Ambrose.