by Mark Alpert
Then David shouted something at her. It surprised Jenna—this was the first time he’d spoken tonight without prompting—and she was so startled, she didn’t catch what he’d said. She was too busy battling the waves, her hands squeezing the boat’s wheel, and at first she thought David had spotted something in the water.
“What was that?” she shouted back at him. “What did you say?”
“Jenna, I apologize.” His voice was loud but lifeless. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“Done what? What are you talking about?”
“What I did to Raza. I shouldn’t have tested him at the Research Center. It’s reprehensible to do scientific tests on prisoners. I should’ve disobeyed that order.”
Jenna grimaced. She didn’t want to be reminded of this, especially not now. She was fighting for their lives. “Let’s just get there and find him, okay?”
“Raza already punished me. He went into my mind and started slashing. He tore out big pieces, the parts of me that were selfish, the parts that wanted success and pleasure. That’s how he took his revenge. He instructed me to tell you that.”
There it was again, the telepathy nonsense. It confused the hell out of her, all this talk about Raza giving instructions and projecting his voice into David’s head. She wanted to dismiss it as rubbish, a fantasy David had invented, maybe because something horrible and traumatic had pushed him over the edge. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that her father had said the same thing: that Raza could somehow broadcast his thoughts into other people’s minds. And she was humble enough to acknowledge that the human brain was mysterious, perhaps the most complex and mysterious thing in the universe. So how could anyone say for sure what it can and can’t do?
But she couldn’t think about it right now. She was racing toward Rikers, less than a hundred yards away, and staring at the concrete seawall that ringed the island. The East River crashed against it, the waves battering the concrete and splashing over the top. She steered the Whaler due north, paralleling the island’s shore, and looked for a dock or a boat ramp, but the seawall ran unbroken along the shoreline. There was no place to tie up the boat, nowhere to land.
Jenna shook her head in frustration. “David, help me look for a dock. Keep your eyes on the shore.”
He obediently turned toward the island. He held the bow rail with one hand and shielded his face from the rain with the other. “Raza instructed me to tell you something else. He wanted you to know how much he loved you. His exact words were, ‘Tell my baji that I love her more than the stars.’ And he promised he’d never stop loving you, no matter where he went.”
Now Jenna was even more confused. Although Raza had lost the ability to speak long ago, this sounded like something her brother might’ve said when he was a little boy. No, that’s just a coincidence! David’s hallucinating, making it all up. But what did he mean by “no matter where he went”? Where could Raza possibly go?
Alarmed, she leaned over the boat’s wheel. “David, was something wrong with Raza when you left him behind? Was he hurt?”
Keeping his eyes on the shoreline, he nodded. “Your brother was struggling. Especially after that soldier threatened him. The man was big, and his mind was vicious.”
“What soldier?” Now she was in a full-blown panic. “Wait, what—”
“Over there!” David pointed at the shore. “Look!”
It wasn’t a dock or a boat ramp. It was a break in the seawall. The relentless waves had cracked the concrete and washed away a ten-foot-wide section, and the East River had poured through the gap. The water streamed across a road on the other side of the wall and flooded a parking lot, but it was less than a foot deep there. The storm had created a shallow inlet on the island.
Jenna turned the wheel and aimed the Whaler at the gap. Then she slammed the throttle all the way forward, and the outboard shrieked.
“Hang on! We’re going in!”
The Whaler hurtled toward the shoreline. It jounced against the waves and leapt into the air and dove through the gap in the seawall. Then it skimmed across the flooded road, its hull scraping against the asphalt below. The friction slowed the boat, and a moment later it skidded to a stop in the parking lot.
Jenna stood up, unsteady, her hands still clenching the wheel. David stood up too and turned toward her. In the dim light his face looked unchanged—still blank, still emotionless. His expression seemed especially strange after what they’d just survived. Jenna remembered what he’d said about Raza slashing his mind. Something was definitely missing. This wasn’t the David Weinberg she once knew, the brilliant ambitious young man she’d almost married.
Then a bullet smashed into the side of his head. It plunged into one ear and exploded out the other. David collapsed in the Whaler’s bow, dead before his body hit the bench.
Jenna spun to her right and saw the gunman. Standing in the ankle-deep floodwaters, he pointed his assault rifle at her. His black uniform was sopping wet.
It was the Angel of Death, here to collect her soul.
THIRTY-FOUR
Vance Keller raised his right hand and placed his left on the cover of a thick black book. It wasn’t a Bible. No one could find a Bible anywhere on Rikers Island. It was a very old laboratory reference book, titled Tables of Physical and Chemical Constants, but fortunately that title wasn’t printed on the book’s musty cover, so Vance had brought it to the inauguration ceremony. He knew that everyone would simply assume it was a Bible when they saw it in the photos.
The man holding the book for Vance was an eighty-year-old white-haired geezer named Barton. Judge Barton had an office in the basement of one of the Rikers jails, where his job was to rubber-stamp the FSU’s search warrants and surveillance orders. His presence on the island was a lucky thing; Vance wanted to take the oath of office as quickly as possible to solidify his hold on the presidency. And another superstorm had just hit New York City and shut down all the air traffic in the region, including helicopter flights to Rikers. If Barton hadn’t already been at the jail complex, they would’ve had a hard time getting a federal judge there to administer the oath.
The fake Bible shook in Judge Barton’s hands. He was gaunt and nearly bald, and his face was hideously wrinkled. He turned his grizzled head and looked around the conference room, which was usually reserved for meetings of the Federal Service Unit’s commanders. Now the room was full of Vance’s bodyguards, a group of heavily armed soldiers handpicked from the ranks of the FSU and the Secret Service. Also in attendance was an FSU camera crew, which usually shot video of prisoner interrogations but was now recording the inauguration ceremony for posterity. Barton stared at the cameraman for a moment, then turned back to Vance and cleared his throat.
“Please repeat after me.” His voice was high-pitched and breathy. “I, Vance Corey Keller, do solemnly swear…”
He paused to allow Vance to repeat the words.
“… that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States…”
He paused again, and Vance echoed him.
“… and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Vance repeated the last words of the oath, then added, “So help me God.”
Barton managed a feeble smile. He lowered his right hand and shook Vance’s. “Congratulations, Mr. President.”
This was the moment Vance had been waiting for, the culmination of all his hard work and sacrifice. Through careful planning and diligence, he’d wrested the reins of power from a dangerous bungler and put them in his own capable hands. Now he would steer the country toward a safer, more prosperous future, engineered to maximize harmony and minimize strife. The American people would no longer seethe with discontent nor claw at one another in hatred and envy. Peace and acceptance would flow from one town to the next, streaming from millions of hearts and minds, all tempered by the Serenity sequence.
But, like so much else in life, the moment of vict
ory was a disappointment. Vance felt no bliss. He didn’t even feel much satisfaction. He still faced so many problems.
He let go of the judge’s hand and pointed at the cameraman. “That’s enough. Send the video to the news media and upload it on the White House website.” He swung his arm from left to right, gesturing at everyone in the conference room. “Okay, folks, thank you for coming. We need to use this room for a classified briefing now, so everyone but the senior commander has to leave.”
Vance declined to shake hands with anyone else. The video crew, the judge, and the soldiers filed out of the room, and Vance’s bodyguards took position in the corridor outside. Only one FSU man remained behind, and it wasn’t Colonel Grant, who’d disappeared shortly after the assassination. It was Grant’s chief deputy, Major Michael Weston, the officer who’d stood beside Vance at the rally at Citi Field. In Grant’s absence, he’d become the acting commander of the Federal Service, and he looked the part. He wore black fatigues and a Kevlar helmet, and he carried a semiautomatic pistol in his belt holster.
Once they were alone in the room, Weston saluted him, standing rigid and tall, as dull as dirt but utterly obedient. Like Vance and Grant, he’d been vaccinated against the virus that carried Serenity, but he didn’t need the DNA sequence to make him tame. He was born that way.
Vance frowned. Even with his most loyal and efficient underlings, it was his policy to be harsh. If you wanted to get the best performance from your subordinates, you had to threaten them sometimes. Human beings just can’t reach their full potential unless they’re at least a little afraid.
“Major, what’s the status of the search for the suspect?”
Weston dropped the salute but still stood at attention. “Mr. President, I’ve assigned three hundred officers to look for Lieutenant Frazier. They’re divided into ten squads, and each is searching a different section of the island. No one has reported sighting him yet, but we’ve only cleared half the buildings in the complex so far.”
“I assume you’re also monitoring the video from the security cameras?”
“Sir, the power outage from the storm has caused a few problems with that. Our emergency generators can’t produce all the power we need, so we had to turn off some of the floodlights and surveillance systems.”
Vance’s frown deepened. He didn’t want to hear this. He wanted to tie up the loose ends and move past the ugliness. “Major, this is unacceptable. Lieutenant Frazier assassinated the president. He murdered my father-in-law in the most brutal way possible. You need to find him immediately.”
“Yes, sir!” Weston saluted again. “I’ll order another hundred officers to join the search.”
“And I don’t want to see any heroics. Trying to capture Frazier alive would be suicidal. The only way to neutralize the man is to use overwhelming force and shoot him on sight. Is that understood?”
“Absolutely, Mr. President. We won’t take any chances.” Weston reached into the chest pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a plastic baggie. “Sir, you asked me to notify you if we discovered any evidence from the crime scene. My men found this under the gurney in the recovery room.”
Vance felt a bolt of panic. Inside the baggie was the syringe, still loaded with yellowish poison.
He quickly grabbed the thing out of Weston’s hand and slipped it into his own pocket. “Thank you, Major. It’s probably a dose of the CRISPR treatment, but I’ll have the laboratory confirm that.”
He took a deep breath, trying not to let his terror show. Along with the fear, he felt an equally strong surge of fury. Not only had Colonel Grant shirked his duty and foisted it on a genetically enhanced lunatic, he’d left a damning trail of evidence. If someone other than Vance had recovered the syringe—an FBI agent, for example, or a Secret Service investigator—then the situation might’ve turned ugly. Both he and Grant could’ve been arrested for treason. Maybe even executed.
The colonel’s carelessness was unforgivable. Vance had no choice except to take action. “Now let’s move on to our next priority. Where the hell is Grant?”
For the first time, Weston’s professional demeanor wavered. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and avoided eye contact. “The colonel isn’t in his office or his quarters, sir. I’ve questioned everyone on his staff, and no one has seen him in the past hour. I also checked with our officers on the Rikers Island Bridge, and they said the colonel hasn’t tried to leave the island either.”
“Then we have to assume the worst. Grant and Frazier vanished at the same time, so it’s likely that they’re collaborating. I suspect that Grant planned the assassination and ordered Frazier to carry it out.”
“But, sir, why would the colonel do that?” Weston’s voice rose slightly, betraying his sympathy for Grant. “Why would he want to kill the president?”
The major’s attitude was understandable. He was a loyal soldier, and he’d served under Grant for years, so naturally he sympathized with the man. But Vance had to make it clear that the definition of loyalty had just changed. From now on, every FSU officer owed his allegiance to the president and no one else. “This matter is highly classified, Major. Due to national-security concerns, I can’t give you all the details. Suffice it to say, Colonel Grant wasn’t what he seemed. He had his motives.”
Weston nodded. Because he lacked the capacity for independent thought, it was relatively easy to redirect him. “So should the search parties be on the lookout for Grant too?”
“Yes, he’s probably hiding with Frazier, so the same rules of engagement should apply to the colonel. In other words, shoot him on sight.”
The major nodded again. He didn’t look happy about the order, but Vance felt sure he’d obey it. After a couple of seconds, he saluted Vance a third time. “One more thing, sir. Our officers on the Rikers Island Bridge are reporting some unusual activity in Queens. Dozens of young males, mostly blacks and Latinos, are rioting at the intersection of Nineteenth Avenue and Hazen Street, which is just outside the security gate on the Queens side of the bridge.”
Curious, Vance cocked his head. “That’s odd. They’re outside in the middle of the storm?”
“Yes, sir. And they’re blocking the entrance to Rikers. They’ve dragged several junk cars into the intersection, and they’ve piled up all kinds of garbage to make a barricade. Most of the rioters are dressed in gang colors, bandannas, that kind of thing. So it’s probably organized gang activity.”
It was just a minor annoyance, Vance thought, but it needed to be dealt with. As soon as Major Weston’s officers eliminated Grant and Frazier, Vance wanted to leave Rikers and go back to Washington, by tomorrow morning at the latest. He had to organize his White House staff and meet with congressional leaders and deliver a televised address to the American people. And he was going to bury his father-in-law too, in a grand patriotic funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. But the streets in Queens had to be cleared before any of that could happen.
Vance pointed at the major. “Send more officers to the bridge. Order them to dismantle the barricade and arrest the troublemakers. If they resist arrest, fire on them.” He folded his arms across his chest. “If necessary, kill them all.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Colonel Grant crouched in the dark lake of seawater that had spread across Rikers Island. He’d found a hiding place behind one of the jail buildings, between a loading dock and a Dumpster. It was a good spot because there were no lights or security cameras nearby, and if any of the search parties came looking for him, Grant would hear them splashing through the water that covered the parking lot. But the floodwaters were already three feet deep and rising, and he couldn’t stay here much longer.
He was afraid. No matter how well he hid himself, the soldiers were sure to find him. Probably before midnight, and definitely before sunrise. And they wouldn’t bother with arresting him or putting him on trial. No, they would terminate him “with extreme prejudice,” as Grant’s buddies in the Special Forces used to say. He’d realized this
fate was inevitable as soon as the alarms started ringing in the Research Center and all the officers ran toward the president’s room. After that debacle, there was no way that Vance would let him live, not even in the darkest cell in the most secret prison in the country. Although Grant fled the Research Center, driven by his strong instinct for survival, he knew he was only buying himself a few more hours.
And he was angry too. He couldn’t believe he’d been reduced to this—cowering in the foul water, with garbage floating all around. After all those years busting his ass in the army and the FSU, clawing his way to the top of the bureaucracy, he was now lower than the lowest criminal. He could just imagine what his ex-wife would say if she saw him. Eli Grant was a bastard, a liar, and an abuser, someone who never cared about morality or basic decency, and now he’s only getting what he deserves. It was a lie, all of it, but no one would ever see the truth. He would die before he could justify all the decisions he’d made.
He shivered. The water was fucking cold. He couldn’t see much in the dark, so he focused on listening to the storm—the wind howling, the rain sluicing down, the East River crashing over the island’s seawall. And he heard other noises coming from the jail behind him, water pouring into the building through a million crevices, and the muffled screams and curses of the detainees, trapped in solitary-confinement cells that were rapidly flooding.
Grant had put most of those people in jail. He’d ordered the arrest of thousands of illegals and suspected terrorists, and he’d supervised their detention and interrogation. And if he were still head of the FSU, he would’ve ordered someone to get the prisoners out of their flooded cells and move them to a higher floor. But that wasn’t his problem anymore. He wasn’t responsible for anyone now, and frankly it was a huge relief. His life was finished, and so were all his problems, all the petty bullshit headaches that used to drive him crazy. So he could ignore their screams.