by A. G. Riddle
Ward raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”
“No one alive knows Yuri Pachenko better than I do. I prevented a bloodbath at the Isle of Citium.”
“And then you took us on a wild goose chase to the North Pole. We lost a lot of people up there and got basically nothing in return. No way we’re going for a South Pole repeat.”
“Apples and oranges, Mr. Ward.”
Avery held up her hands. “Stop it.”
The room fell silent. Outside, Desmond could hear shouting. Boots pounding the floor, a stampede.
Avery pulled the door open. The welcome center was emptying, the troops leaving plates of barbecue and beans half-eaten, cups of tea still full.
“Something’s wrong,” Lin said.
They rushed out of the room, past the ticket counters and into the main concourse. There was a large projection screen set up at gate eighteen. It showed imagery from several drones from around the country, and perhaps around the world, judging by the varying amounts of sunlight. Balloons floated through the clouds. There were no baskets below. Each balloon carried only a solar cell with three panels and some kind of small metal device.
Ward grabbed a major in the Oklahoma National Guard by the upper arm. “What’s happening?”
“Don’t know. They just started appearing all over the world.”
“So what? Why’s everyone panicking?”
The man gritted his teeth. “We aren’t panicking, sir. We’ve been activated. And people are dying.”
Peyton stepped forward. “Who’s dying?”
“Sick, mostly. Terminally ill,” the major replied.
Desmond saw Avery’s face fill with concern.
Another wave of discussion went through the troops gathered around the screen, a rumor spreading like a virus.
Desmond listened closely, and his mouth went dry when he realized what they were saying. The president of the United States was dead. Cerebral hemorrhage. So was the governor of Oklahoma—and every other state in the union.
A sergeant ran up to the major. “Sir, Colonel Weathers needs to see you right now.”
The major left without another word.
Lin stepped into his place. “Mr. Ward, we need to go, right now.”
Ward shook his head.
She stepped closer to him and spoke quietly but with force. “Listen to me. Those balloons are Citium devices. Together with the internet, they are accessing Rapture nanites—the ‘cure’ you and your government distributed to stop the X1 pandemic. They are in control now. And Yuri’s next move will be to demand that the government hand us over. We need to go, the five us, alone. Right now.”
Chapter 66
Desmond’s eyes met Peyton’s, and he saw fear in them. That energized him. Her mother’s words had rattled her. They needed to move.
“Ward, listen to her,” he said.
Avery turned her head toward the end of the concourse, like a predator sensing a threat. Ten National Guard troops in camo were marching toward them. They passed deserted shops as they drew closer: Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Harold’s Shoe Shine, EA Sports, CNBC.
Desmond got Avery’s attention. “What’s the best way out?”
“Lower level. Follow me.”
Just like that, the decision was made. Avery broke from the group and began running, Lin behind her, then Peyton. Desmond glared at Ward, who shook his head.
One of the National Guardsmen called out, “Agent Ward!”
His voice echoed in the tall concourse, the sound bouncing off glass walls and hard floors.
Eyes turned to them.
Desmond and Ward joined the fleeing group.
Avery was almost to the escalator.
“Agent Ward! We need to speak with you!”
Avery took the stairs three at a time, prancing down the inactive escalator like a cat scaling a mountainside. Peyton and Lin struggled to keep up.
“Halt!”
Desmond pulled ahead of Ward, then paused to let him catch up.
Other troops were stirring now, joining the unit chasing them. Orders were called out, the meaning clear: stop them.
At the bottom of the escalator, he just glimpsed Avery barreling through an emergency exit beyond the baggage claim. Lin and Peyton were trailing far behind, and Desmond and Ward soon caught up with them. The four of them burst onto the tarmac together, a gust of cold wind greeting them.
Avery was already climbing the stairs to a Gulfstream jet, and the engines were running by the time the others reached it and pulled the staircase in.
The tarmac filled with troops as the jet taxied down the runway, but they didn’t shoot. A fuel truck raced out and blocked the runway. Avery turned the jet and raced down another.
As the jet took off and gained altitude, Desmond looked across the aisle to find Peyton looking at him, worry in her expression. He wondered if he could protect her.
The laptop beeped. The tracking application displayed a message:
Target in Motion
Yuri watched the dot move away from Will Rogers Airport, southward.
He grabbed his sat phone and called Conner.
“It’s begun. We need to meet.”
Next he called Melissa Whitmeyer. “I need to know if there are any Rapture devices on that plane we can control.”
Chapter 67
“Turn your phones off!” Lin yelled.
All eyes turned to her.
“Do it! Right now. Your life may depend on it.”
It turned out only Ward and Avery had phones. Both turned them off.
“Happy?” Ward said.
“I did that to protect you.”
Ward got out of his chair and moved up the aisle, stopping at Desmond’s chair, looming over him, still breathing hard from the frantic escape from the airport.
“Answers, Hughes. Right now.”
“You’ll get them.” Desmond stood and brushed past the burly man. “First things first.”
Avery was in the cockpit, holding her side, breathing hard and talking with air traffic control, trying to convince them it was all a big mistake, that she didn’t in fact have Lin and Peyton Shaw and Desmond Hughes on board.
“Hey,” Desmond whispered.
She glanced back and held her hand tighter to her side. He saw blood oozing out around it.
“You okay?” He stepped forward and took a closer look. There was a bandage over her abdomen. It was pink in the center and dark red at the edges.
“I’m fine. Just pulled a stitch.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I am, Des. Relax. I just overexerted myself.”
“You were shot?”
“Shrapnel from a bomb on the Isle.”
He studied her. “That was a heck of a leap from the second story.”
“Didn’t have much choice. Thanks for covering me.”
He smiled. “I’d cover you any time.”
She deadpanned. “You wish.”
He laughed. “Right.”
She jerked her head and shouted into the radio. “Negative, OKC ATC, we cannot land at Chandler Field.”
To him, she said, “What do you need?”
“Fuel and range?”
“Fully fueled. We’ll get maybe sixty-five hundred miles, depending on how fast we push her.”
The Charter Antarctica base camp was too far. “We’ll have to refuel.”
She worked the navigation system. “We need to get out of US airspace quickly. And probably avoid Mexico and Brazil.”
“Best option?”
“Get to the Gulf …”
“And fly around South America?”
“Take too long,” Avery said. “Where’s your site in Antarctica?”
“Due south from Cape Town.”
Avery studied the map. “We’ll fly south through the Gulf and cross to the Pacific at Panama. We’ll skirt the western edge of South America, go over the Andes, and land at Mar del Plata.”
“What about Buenos Aires?”
“I don’t favor it. More people, more military presence—and more likelihood of being captured.”
“Right. What’s the total distance on the flight path to Mar del Plata?”
Avery tapped the screen. “It’ll be close: 5,960 miles. About ten or eleven hours in the air.”
The plane would be about ninety percent out of fuel when they landed. Not ideal, but doable, assuming they didn’t run into trouble.
“Okay. When you get the autopilot engaged, join us in the cabin. We need to talk.”
She nodded and returned her focus to the flight instruments.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “It’s good to see you.”
A coy smile crossed her lips. “I know it is.”
Desmond couldn’t help but shake his head as he walked back down the aisle. When he looked up, he found everyone studying him expectantly: Ward, Peyton, and Lin.
“We’ll refuel in Argentina in about eleven hours,” he announced.
Lin spoke first. “How far to your camp in Antarctica after that?”
Desmond had flown there from Buenos Aires a few times. Mar del Plata was close to Buenos Aires, the flight times likely the same. “Six hours, give or take.”
“Well,” Lin said, “seems we’ll be on this plane for quite a while.”
“Plenty of time to talk,” said Ward.
“And we will. When Avery joins us.”
Desmond walked to where Peyton was seated.
Lin eyed him a moment, then stood. To Ward, she said, “Let’s take stock of our provisions, shall we, Mr. Ward?” The two of them walked to the back of the plane, leaving Peyton and Desmond alone.
Peyton motioned to the seat beside her, and Desmond sat down. She held out her hand, palm up, and he took it and interlocked his fingers with hers. For a moment, he thought she was going to lean close to him, but she held her distance.
Her voice was soft, revealing a vulnerability he had only seen a few times. “After the battle on the Isle, when we didn’t find you… I was so worried.”
“Me too. They held me captive for a while. I wondered what happened to you. And Avery.” The last part came out before he could even think about it.
She blinked several times. “You have a history with her.”
He hesitated, unsure how to answer. He settled for the simple truth. “Yes.”
“And now you remember it.”
He nodded.
Her hand loosened and gradually let go of his. He felt himself hanging on, squeezing tighter than her.
“It’s okay.”
He didn’t know whether she was urging him to let go—of her, or her hand, or both—or forgiving him. Or maybe just filling the painful silence.
“She and I—”
“You don’t have to explain, Des.” Peyton looked out the window. “We were together a long time ago. I only want you to be happy.”
The truth was, he didn’t know what he wanted. Whom he wanted to be with. It’s like he was starting over in life—and the looming battle with Yuri was the only thing he could see.
“I want to talk about this when everything… is over. Can we do that?”
“Sure.”
“After the Isle, what happened?”
“Avery was injured.”
“In her abdomen.”
Peyton nodded. “How did you know? Has she re-injured it?”
“Yes. She’s bleeding.”
Peyton moved to get up. “I need to take a look.”
The relationship between the two women had certainly improved. Or maybe it was just Peyton being Peyton—always a doctor first. Or both.
“She’s all right,” Desmond said. “And I think she’s got her hands full at the moment.”
“Okay.”
“What happened after?”
“My mom wanted to find the Beagle. And we did. In the Arctic. We searched it for weeks. Found bones from extinct species. Humans, animals. It was like Noah’s Ark.”
“What did she do with them?”
“Sequenced their DNA.”
“Interesting.”
“We found a message that led us to more bones—hidden in a cave in northern Spain. Her father, Dr. Paul Kraus, had hidden them there. He was a member of the Citium, one of the original architects of the Looking Glass—one of the people Yuri killed.”
“You’re kidding.” Desmond remembered reading in the pages William Shaw left for them that Lin’s father was on the Beagle, but he never knew any more about the man. “Why did he go to so much trouble to hide the bones?”
“Kraus believed they were bread crumbs, pieces of a larger puzzle—a code hidden in the human genome.”
“What kind of code?”
“Evidence that evolution was a more complex process than previously believed. His theory was that it was interactive—that as humans developed consciousness and more powerful brains, evolution accelerated. New mutations appeared.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” Peyton thought a moment. “When we got the samples from Spain, she had me deliver them to a supercollider in Texas.”
“Like the LHC at CERN?”
“Yes, but bigger.”
“So you’re saying the code in the human genome is somehow related to a quantum particle, or…?”
“Yes. I think somehow the pattern is the key to accessing a quantum process related to evolution.”
Desmond turned the facts over in his mind. “And this is your mother’s end game?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
It didn’t make sense to Desmond either.
He realized Avery was standing in the aisle. Lin and Ward fell in behind her. The three took seats across from Desmond and Peyton.
“Okay,” Ward said. “What exactly is the Looking Glass?”
Chapter 68
“They’ve left US airspace,” Yuri said.
On the other end of the line, Conner’s voice became reflective. “Could be looking for asylum somewhere. A nation with limited internet access. Maybe try to convince them to fight.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt that. Desmond and Lin both play to win. They’re going for Rendition. If they destroy it… it would set us back years. Decades, perhaps.”
“We need to know where they’re going.”
“I’m working on it.”
“What’s the status of Rook?”
“Operating perfectly. It works, Conner. Two million lives and counting. Waiting for Rendition.”
At CDC Headquarters in Atlanta, Elliott Shapiro and Phil Stevens were studying the fatality statistics. Reports were sporadic at first, but X1 treatment centers had alerted county and state health departments of increased mortality rates among their older population. There was a strong correlation between the mortalities and those affected by Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and dementia. Casualties continued to rise at a steady rate—a pattern that was too consistent to be a natural phenomenon.
EIS agents were en route to investigate when the president of the United States and the governors of all fifty states collapsed. Autopsies revealed the same cause of death in each case: brain aneurysms that ruptured, causing a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Death was nearly instantaneous. The event left little doubt that the fatalities were a coordinated attack. Assassinations. But why target the elderly population affected with neurological disorders? An experiment, perhaps? A sort of trial balloon?
The warning came soon after: the vice president would be next, unless he handed over Peyton Shaw, Lin Shaw, and Desmond Hughes. The news had been a punch in the gut for Elliott.
“What do we do?” Phil asked.
“Start trials. Begin monitoring patients with neurological and other terminal illnesses. When they take the next group, maybe we’ll learn something. There could be a key to slowing the process down, or stopping it.”
In truth, Elliott counted that as unlikely. Their best chance of stopping this was the people their enemy was after: Peyton, Lin, and Desmond.
Chapter 69
“The Looking Glass,” Desmond began, “is… a very complex device.”
Ward rolled his eyes. “So give me the Looking Glass for Idiots version.”
Desmond looked over at Lin.
“Perhaps I should begin,” she said. “First, please realize that the Citium you all have come to know,” she gestured to Ward and Avery, “is not the same organization I joined—in focus or methods.”
“Yeah,” Ward grumbled, “we know that. Ancient Greek philosophers on the island of Kitium, Zeno, blah, blah, blah. Just get to the part where you all ripped the world a new one and what to do about it.”
“We,” Lin motioned to Desmond, “didn’t. The Citium is in a civil war. That war began in 1986 when almost every scientist was killed at the Citium conclave. That background is important for you to understand. You’ve only seen pieces of the whole, Mr. Ward.” Lin fixed Ward with a stare, silently daring him to challenge her.
Desmond sensed that she had an ulterior motive for telling this story: she wanted to explain herself to Peyton. It was as if she was confessing to her daughter—on the off chance that it was her last opportunity to do so.
“Central to their work,” Lin continued, “was the theory that our world was not as it seemed. That the myths everyone believed—myths that explained existence—were merely placeholders, fictional explanations that gave people peace of mind until science could fill in the blanks.
“They watched as, one by one, those blanks were filled in. The sun was the center of our solar system. The Earth orbited around it. The moon orbited around the Earth. Gravity—an invisible glue—held them all together. And there were countless other solar systems and galaxies. Billions of suns and worlds. Some worlds were billions of years older than our own. This implied a simple truth, a statistical certainty: there was life beyond our world. And there had been millions, possibly billions of other civilizations long before us.”
Lin took a deep breath. “But the most surprising revelation was that there was no evidence of those civilizations.”
“No space junk,” Peyton whispered, as if reciting from memory.