Blood Echo

by Rice, Christopher

  “The cell degradation was constant with each of the measured doses we used. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing, so we just kept going. Sorry. It was exciting.”

  “I get it. I’m excited, too.”

  But he sounds dazed, because that’s what he actually is.

  “As soon as we have more paradrenaline, we can get back to work.”

  “I understand,” he says.

  “This could be huge, Cole. Huge.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s—”

  “Early. I know. I get it. It’s one thing to wipe it out in a lab sample, another in a live subject, let alone a human one.”

  “Still . . . congratulations,” she says.

  “To you, too, Doctor.”

  He hangs up. For a while, he can’t move. The jet’s engines suddenly sound like they’re miles away and he’s hearing them from underwater.

  It’s not too soon to say he was right about at least one thing. The potential medical implications of paradrenaline are too significant to let someone as devious and unreliable as Noah Turlington anywhere near them, no matter how brilliant he is. He’s got other plans for Noah. Plans more appropriate to his skill set and his weaknesses. And Noah can certainly work with the fruits of Kelley’s research here and there. But not for a single moment will Cole allow him unrestricted access to the dazzling hormone that produced those results.

  For the project, it’s not a loss. Kelley Chen is just as brilliant as Noah. Also, she’s not a narcissistic sociopath with a history of deceit and sexual manipulation. She’s a PhD from Stanford and a former dorm mate of Cole’s who applies the same obsessive focus to her work today that she applied to her studies back when they were both undergrads. Her background check was ten times more thorough than any Cole had ordered on an employee previously; the results, divinely and delightfully boring.

  And she hasn’t complained once about being sequestered to Iceland and the lab he’s built for her there, even though the place is hardly as plush as The Consortium’s island. It’s a nice facility, but certain corners had to be cut, given he was footing the bill himself.

  If the band ever gets back together.

  But Kelley’s right.

  It’s too soon to get too excited.

  Too soon to be sure if they’ve actually discovered a cure for cancer, or just the first fleeting suggestion of one.

  28

  Charley’s getting a crick in her neck from staring down at Luke’s laptop, but she’s too engrossed to care. Once Luke explained where the flash drive had come from, the three of them scrambled to load the thing into his computer as fast as they could. They’ve been standing over his kitchen counter staring down at it for several minutes now. “What are these?” Charley finally asks.

  “Screenshots from someone else’s computer,” Luke says.

  “I got that part,” she answers, “but what are all these arrows?”

  “Seismic readings,” Marty says.

  “What, like earthquake risk?” Charley asks.

  “No, they’re measurements of the thickness of the rock in the path of the tunnel. They shot seismic waves down through the mountain, and the speed at which the waves came back gave them a sense of what’s down there, but . . .” He reaches around Luke and swipes the touch pad. “They’re different. I mean, they’re the same, but they’re different.”

  “What’s that mean, Buddha?” Luke asks.

  Marty points to the line across the top of each image. Both alternate between wavy and jagged in the same pattern. “That there’s the ground level, sort of. I mean, we’re dealing with a mountainous surface, so the word ground is relative, but you know what I mean. Point is, it’s the same in both. Then these clusters of arrows, those are speed indicators. They show how quickly the seismic waves moved through the rock under the surface. The denser the cluster, the slower the waves travel, the thicker the rock. I mean, this isn’t my area of expertise, but it makes sense.”

  “Makes sense how?” Charley asks.

  “Well, it’s the type of readings Clements would need to do before they drill. He’s got to have some sense of what’s down there. Normally you drill boreholes, but they’re going through the bottom of a mountain range, so drilling a bunch of holes straight down to try to get samples isn’t the easiest. This way he just shoots seismic waves through the rocks and interprets what comes back and then calculates what he’s going to need to drill. But one of these has to be fake.”

  “How do you know?” Luke asks. “They could just be two different attempts that turned up different readings.”

  “Maybe, but I doubt it. They’re too different. In the one on the left, the arrows thicken up a good ways from the bottom. I’m not a geologist, but I’ve heard talk around town from the crews. The mountains are a bunch of different rock types, and some are easier to drill than others. I’m guessing one of these maps is showing a bunch of metamorphic rock right in the path of the tunnel, but the other isn’t. And metamorphic rock, that’s tough stuff.”

  “OK. So if one’s fake, is he trying to rip somebody off?” Luke asks.

  Charley gets an idea. “Like maybe the tunnel’s impossible to build and he doesn’t want anyone to know. Could be an insurance thing. He stocks up on a bunch of equipment and then he can’t drill, so he’s got some kind of claim.” She feels pretty satisfied with this theory, but when she sees their blank looks, she adds, “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  “What else is on here?” Marty asks.

  He elbows Luke aside, but Luke doesn’t protest. She’s relieved, once again, to see how well they get along these days. The sense that they were both holding down the home front was a comfort to her while she was away, even if she suspects Luke has more mixed feelings about his role than he’s been letting on.

  Marty starts clicking through a file folder with no label. More screen caps fill the laptop’s display. Most of them look like old photographs of Jordy and Lacey, chronicling their happier moments together. In all of them, they’re scantily clad, mostly on various beaches, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. They’re a rough-around-the-edges version of someone’s idea of an idealized young Southern California couple. Surfboards, open-air Jeeps, bottles of Corona they toast while making goo-goo eyes at each other.

  “Oh, crap. Tell me this isn’t her personal flash drive and now we’ve gotta figure what she actually wanted you to see,” Marty asks.

  “I wish I could tell you that,” Luke answers, “but I can’t.”

  “Well, if that is the case, she’s certainly not working for any intelligence agencies,” Charley says.

  “Given recent events, that’s good to know,” Marty says.

  “Not a shock,” Luke says. “She doesn’t sound like a good candidate for anything except rehab. When Mona called her parents, she said they never wanted to speak to her again because she stole medications from her dying grandmother.”

  “Addiction’s a tricky business,” Marty says. “Maybe she’s trying to do something right for a change.”

  Is Marty offended? Is Luke afraid he offended Marty? Or is the sudden silence just a sign they’re all chewing over the flash drive’s contents? Charley figures it’s option three.

  “Wait,” Luke barks, “what was that?”

  Marty was opening pictures so fast he didn’t notice the odd one out.

  It’s not a photograph of Lacey and Jordy in better days; it’s another screenshot. The background’s white, and the squares filling the screen are so small at first glance she misses their outlines.

  Charley leans in to get a closer look. They’re chat boxes, clustered together. What looks like a single screen cap is actually a collage of them. Over and over again, Lacey’s cropped two exchanges from longer threads and assembled them into a collage. After a second or two of reading, Charlotte can see why; in each crop, the second text box is exactly the same, something that looks like a Bible verse.

  The verse is the same every time: The
ir work will be shown for what it is because the day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.—1 Corinthians 3:13

  It’s followed by a phrase, Find your fire. Aside from being underlined, the words are set off from the rest of the post in light-blue text.

  After she confirms the verse doesn’t vary, she reads some of the messages to which it was posted as a response.

  Her breath catches. The skin around her neck suddenly feels tight.

  NO! His work will not be REVEALED!!! We r his agents. We r his soldiers! ACTION MUST BE TAKEN, be it against the sodomites or the idolaters. Or the abortionists. TO SIT IDLY BY IS TO INVITE THE KINGDOM OF SATAN!

  The other messages are similar.

  DEEDS AND WORKS. No one on the threads recognizing value of WORKS and DEEDS! FAITH IS NOT ENOUGH. One must act against those who act contrary to God. MY GOD HAS A FINGER OF FIRE!

  Slowly, Marty drags the chat collage to one side of the screen so it’s still visible.

  But it’s obvious he’s more taken with the photos of Lacey and Jordy.

  The tone of each chat exchange is basically the same. Someone with a screen name that makes no sense to her, probably because she’s never been very religious, having some sort of breakdown over gays, abortion doctors, and Muslims and the failure of society to react to the supposed evils of each group. Then, in each instance, someone with a different screen name responds with the exact same Bible verse, followed by a link.

  “Find your fire?” Luke says. “It looks like a link.”

  “Well, I can’t click on it because the whole thing’s a screen cap,” Marty says.

  “Where does it go?” Charley asks. “A chat room? It feels like an invite, for sure.”

  “To what, though?” Marty says. “Are they asking for an argument, or are they trying to get the original commenter to calm the hell down?”

  “My God has a finger of fire,” Luke reads. “‘Find your fire.’ I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound good.”

  “For whoever the poster’s wailing about maybe,” she says, “but the poster . . . well, they might consider it a nice offer.”

  “Wait,” Marty says.

  It doesn’t sound like he’s responding to what Luke just said, so she shifts her gaze to the photo he’s just opened on the right-hand side of the screen. It’s a strange one. No beach, no smiles, no sun. It’s blurry and dark.

  At first she thinks it’s some close-up of a wall; then she realizes she’s looking at a man’s naked back and right arm as he sleeps. She hopes he’s sleeping. She’s not sure if it’s Jordy, but the man’s build is similar to the guy in the other photos. What sticks out is the square of lighter skin cupping his upturned shoulder. Not lighter skin, she realizes. A bandage.

  She puts her finger to it.

  “Yep,” Marty says, “saw that, too.”

  “What is it?” Luke asks.

  “An injury maybe?”

  “An injury she thinks we should see.”

  As if he’s reading her mind, Marty goes back to the other photos. If they aren’t already seeing the connection, they will be shortly.

  Lacey didn’t just want them to see how much the once-happy couple used to love the beach. She wanted them to see Jordy shirtless; she wanted them to see what was on his shoulder up until she snapped a shot of him sleeping.

  Marty was right. In all the beach shots, Jordy sports a large tattoo on his shoulder, and it looks like it’s mostly words.

  “Can you zoom?”

  “I can try.”

  It only takes a few clicks before they see it, and when they do, Luke rears back from the computer as if it’s a coiled snake. They can’t even read all the words, but they don’t need to, because the name of the Bible verse is tattooed larger than the verse itself. The same verse somebody—Jordy?—used in crackpot chat rooms to try to both calm and establish communication with people who wanted to inflict violence on groups they deemed morally repugnant.

  “What the fuck?” Marty whispers.

  “So someone’s using the same Bible verse in all these chat rooms, and Jordy’s got the same verse on his shoulder up until . . . recently, I guess? When was the photo of his back taken?” He clicks on it, opens a new window containing the photo’s data points. “Three weeks ago.”

  Charley says, “We know the photo was taken three weeks ago. We don’t know if he had that tattoo removed three weeks ago.”

  “No, but we know three weeks ago is when Lacey Shannon decided that somebody needed to know that her boyfriend got his tattoo removed,” Luke says. “And that date comes after the dates on these chats where the same passage from Corinthians was used. So if it’s Jordy talking to these whack jobs, inviting them to chat or whatever—”

  “He’s not just inviting them to chat,” Marty says, “he’s inviting them to find their fire. Is that how you ask somebody out to coffee?”

  “No,” Charley says.

  “Find your fire,” Luke whispers.

  “My God has a finger of fire,” Charley repeats.

  Nobody says anything for a bit.

  “Not smart, using a tattoo on your body to communicate with potential psychopaths,” Charlotte says.

  “Whether he’s smart or not,” Marty says, “something happened during these conversations that convinced him he needed to get part of his skin taken off. Must have been major.”

  “And Lacey noticed,” Luke says.

  “And thought you should notice, too,” Charlotte says.

  “This isn’t her personal flash drive,” Marty says. “Every picture on here is the same. Jordy’s shirtless in every one. She’s showing us that tattoo.”

  “And that he had it removed,” Luke says.

  “OK. So . . . the seismic maps?” Charlotte asks.

  The third detail seems to stump all of them.

  Then Charlotte feels her face get hot all of a sudden.

  “Shit,” she whispers.

  “What?” Luke asks.

  “Marty, what else goes into building a tunnel besides the drills?” she asks.

  “Probably something to stabilize the hole with. Equipment to drag away the broken rock you’ve drilled through. Explosives to . . .”

  Marty’s face drains of color.

  “What, guys?” Luke asks.

  “I had it backwards,” Charley says.

  “Backwards how?” Luke asks.

  “Maybe the one that said the tunnel’s going to be twice as hard to build isn’t the real one,” she says. “It’s the fake one.”

  “Because Jordy wants more explosives than he’s actually going to need,” Marty adds.

  “Because they make fire,” Charlotte says. “And that’s what he wants to give to these lunatics. Fire. ‘It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.’”

  “Fire purchased through entirely legal means,” Marty says.

  Luke’s the one to finally break the long silence. “Hate in his heart. That’s what she said: ‘Jordy is a man with hate in his heart.’”

  “She wasn’t trying to make the case that he was a woman beater. She was saying what she could to get you to throw him in a cell right away. That way she could . . .” Marty swallows.

  Charley finishes the sentence for him. “She could make the case that Jordy’s a terrorist.”

  Luke turns his attention to the computer and its mess of open windows.

  “Well,” he finally says, “does she?”

  When the phone rings, Luke yelps in surprise. Marty jumps, but manages to keep his reaction silent.

  Charlotte walks to the handset, checks the caller ID.

  “Unavailable,” she reads aloud.

  Luke just shakes his head. Maybe he’s already got some sense of who it is, but he doesn’t want to believe it.

  Charlotte answers using speakerphone.

  “This is a very interesting conversation,” Cole Graydon says. At first, she
assumes he’s driving, but the sound of rushing air is too deep and steady. He must be in the air.

  “And you’ve been listening in, I take it?” Charley asks.

  “Speakerphone. That’s charming.”

  “Really?” Luke says. “You’ve been spying on everything we say, and you’re gonna bitch about being on speakerphone.”

  “We do not spy on everything you say. We have certain words programmed into the monitoring system that send us an alert. If we receive one of those, then we listen to everything you’re saying. This is about your safety, guys. Trust me.”

  “OK,” Luke says, approaching the phone, “so which word triggered the system or whatever? Jordy or Clements? These guys are friends of yours, right? I mean, how else did you get them to build a tunnel in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Well, money, for starters,” Cole says. “But the word that triggered the alert was terrorism.”

  “I see,” Charley says. “So you’re afraid there might be a terrorist attack in Altamira, and you wanted to be sure you could evacuate us in time?”

  “Let’s meet,” Cole says. “I’m in the air, but I can redirect to you pretty quickly. I’d like to hear more about what’s on this flash drive.”

  “So you haven’t been listening to everything we’re saying, but you know about the flash drive?” Luke asks.

  “Your conversations are archived. When we get an alert, we go into the archive and review it to see if the alert was justified. OK? Would you like my help with this or not?”

  “Depends on what you call help,” Luke says.

  “For Pete’s sake, I’m siphoning enough money and development into your little industry-free town to keep it going for decades to come. What else do you want from me? Weekly puppies?”

  “You siphoned Jordy Clements into our town,” Luke says. “That’s why I’m asking.”

  Charlotte moves to Luke and places both hands gently on his chest, then she looks into his eyes imploringly. She can only hope her expression conveys everything she’s feeling. That she understands Luke’s anger, and his fear; that she feels it, too. And that he still needs to shut the hell up. For now anyway. They’re not going to get Cole to help by bossing him around.