by David Mack
“Last I heard,” Gary said.
“Good. Tell her to go on the attack; start taking back some lost ground. Send Raul and Qi Xian to help her.” Turning to Shawn and Kyle, he asked, “Have either of you heard any news about the troops that breached our line out at Fort Lawton?”
Kyle pointed at the barren strip of land between Magnolia Bluff and Queen Anne. “Orson’s holding them at the fallback line west of the railroad tracks.”
“He’ll need reinforcements,” Jordan said. “Send over Sandra, Aasif, and Oliver. Make sure they know I want those soldiers back on their base by sundown.”
“Done,” Kyle said, stepping away to relay the order to one of the telepathic senders, who served as the Movement’s primary means of clandestine communication.
Jordan clapped his hands together. “Okay. Everyone else, let’s get to work securing the Center. Go.” The war council dispersed, and people moved quickly, taking their specific instructions from Shawn, Kyle, Gary, and the few of Jordan’s bodyguards who had professional close protection experience. Watching them all swing into action, it took Jordan a moment to notice that Maia was standing just behind him, staring at him.
“It won’t be enough,” she said.
“It never is,” Jordan replied, steeling himself for the worst, which he knew was yet to come. “It never is.”
THIRTY-THREE
12:42 P.M.
MARCO TAPPED AND dragged icons, windows, and widgets across his computer’s touchscreen with such force that he nearly knocked it off the desk. He was struggling to keep up with the accelerating cascade failures of the city’s traffic monitoring cameras, which he had been using in a desperate effort to find Tom and Diana, who had gone missing after an altercation with a squad of enhanced soldiers nearly half an hour earlier.
Jed watched over Marco’s shoulder and cautioned him, “Easy, buddy. You’ll find ’em.”
“Not at this rate, I won’t,” Marco said, frustrated beyond all reason by the collapsing municipal data network. “The Army’s fragging all our public surveillance systems. By this time tomorrow, I won’t even be able to tell if it’s raining without looking out the window.”
“Sure you will,” Jed said. With a wry smile, he added, “This is Seattle. It’s almost always raining.”
Behind them, a man said in a gruff voice, “Ever the optimist, eh, Jed?”
They spun about. Jed started to raise his rifle—and froze.
Dennis Ryland stood in the doorway of the crisis center, his pistol raised and pointed at Jed and Marco. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I’m glad to see Homeland Security left somebody running the show here at NTAC, but I was kind of hoping it’d be more than just the two of you.” After a brief pause, he added, “No offense, of course.”
“None taken,” Jed said. “Mind telling us how you got in?”
Dennis shrugged. “I still have a few backdoor codes in the system,” he said. He smiled at Marco. “No thanks to you.” Pointing at Marco’s vest, he added, “Got enough gear, son? I’ve never seen anybody stuff the pockets of a tac vest like that.”
“I like to be prepared,” Marco said.
“Obviously. You must’ve been a Boy Scout.” Lifting his chin at Jed, Dennis said, “Would you mind putting down your rifle? It makes me a little nervous.”
Jed flashed an insincere smile. “And we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”
A pistol’s muzzle edged into view from the dark corridor and pressed against the back of Dennis’s neck as Tom Baldwin answered, “No, we sure as hell wouldn’t. Put your weapon on the floor, Dennis. Right now.”
The former director of NTAC did as he was told. He lowered his pistol, bent down slowly, and set it at his feet.
Tom said, “Kick it over to Jed.”
With a tap of his foot, Dennis sent his sidearm skittering across the tiled floor to Jed, who caught it under his shoe while lifting his rifle and aiming it at Dennis.
“Step inside and take a seat,” Tom said, nudging Dennis forward. Tom followed Dennis into the crisis center. Half a step behind him was Diana, who entered with her own pistol leveled at Dennis’s head.
The middle-aged man settled into a chair and responded to the agents’ intense glares with an infuriatingly nonplussed smile. “Guys, don’t you think you’re overreacting here?”
Diana said, “I haven’t shot you yet, have I?”
“You might want to hear what I have to say before you blow my brains out.”
Tom holstered his weapon and nodded for Diana to do the same. She hesitated until Jed said, “It’s okay, Skouris. I’ve got him covered.” Reassured, Diana holstered her pistol.
“Okay,” Tom said to Dennis. “You want to talk? Talk.”
The smile faded from Dennis’s careworn features. “I’m in trouble,” he began.
Diana quipped, “And we give a shit because …?”
He ignored her and pressed on. “I authorized an off-the-books research project at Haspelcorp. Three scientists told me they could make a device to mass-neutralize promicin. Before long it turned into a multibillion-dollar investment.”
“Wait, I’ve heard this story before,” Tom said with a cynical frown. “‘And then, something went horribly wrong …’”
Dennis’s furrowed brow betrayed his growing irritation. “At some point in the last twenty-four hours, those three scientists carried that device out the front door of a top-secret lab. By now it could be just about anywhere. Including here.”
“I don’t mean to sound callous,” Tom said, “but so what? A device that can neutralize promicin might be able to put an end to this little civil war.”
Lifting his eyebrows, Dennis said, “Exactly! That’s why I backed their project in the first place. It was the solution I’d been looking for—a way to end Collier’s insane movement without risking any more innocent lives.”
Diana wore a quizzical expression. “But why would they steal it? Corporate espionage? Personal agenda?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Dennis said. “I’ve been trying to figure that out for the last hour, but no answer I can think of makes any sense.”
Tom paced behind Dennis, on the other side of a row of computers. “Before we can figure out the why, we need to take a closer look at the who. These three scientists— you said they approached you with the project. Did they work for Haspelcorp?”
“No, they were independent contractors. I’d never heard of them, but a background check verified their credentials, so I listened to their pitch.”
Marco’s curiosity was fully engaged. “If these guys are major players in promicin research, I might know who they are,” he said. “What’re their names?”
“Peter Jakes, Robert Wells, and Helen Kuroda.”
Marco shook his head, stumped. “Never heard of ‘em.”
Tom cast a horrified glare at Dennis. “Did you say their last names were Jakes, Wells, and Kuroda?” Dennis confirmed it with a curt nod, and Tom recoiled in shock. He said to Diana, “Those were the real names of three of the Marked agents.”
“Whoa!” Marco said. “Are you saying Haspelcorp backed a research project by the Marked?” He stared at Dennis. “Are you one-hundred-percent sure you know what they were building?”
“Of course,” Dennis said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
Doubtful looks passed between the agents.
Marco said, “No offense, Dennis, but you can’t even use a computer.”
He replied defensively, “I’m learning.”
“Can you tell a hodoscope from a cavity magnetron?”
“Sure.”
Staring him down, Marco asked, “How?”
Dennis hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before mumbling, “Um … one has a cavity?”
“Nice try,” Marco said. “Tell me everything you procured for the Marked: parts, raw materials, fuels—the works.”
Rolling his eyes, Dennis said, “For God’s sake, Marco! There was so much, I can’t remember it all off the
top of my head. But the one they really broke my balls about a couple days ago was the shipment from CERN—”
“Antimatter and a new transuranic element?” Marco cut in.
“Yes,” Dennis said, apparently caught off guard. “How …?”
Marco felt the blood rush from his face. He looked at Tom and Diana, who also had paled at Dennis’s unwitting revelation.
“Oh, shit,” Tom said. He stared, dumbstruck, at Dennis. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Who those people were? Or what you just put into their hands?”
Dennis studied their reactions, frowned, then replied, “Apparently not.”
Diana ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, let’s think this through: Whatever it is the Marked had Dennis bring in from CERN, that’s what gave the U.S. government an excuse to attack Seattle. Now the Marked have an antimatter bomb. So the question we need to be asking is: What’s their target?”
“There might be evidence at the lab,” Dennis said. “They set it on fire before they left. They must’ve been trying to hide something.”
“Makes sense,” Tom said. “Do you have any pictures of the lab, either inside or out?”
“On my phone,” Dennis said. “I downloaded thirty seconds of video from the secure feed, in case we had to analyze it.”
“Good,” Tom said. “Give it to Marco.”
Pulling open his suit jacket, he said, “I’m going to reach in very slowly.” Tom nodded for him to continue.
Dennis produced his phone and handed it to Marco, who quickly accessed its most recent saved video file and hit PLAY.
The image on the phone’s screen was so dark and murky that Marco could barely discern any details. “Not sure I can use this,” he said to Tom. “I need to see a bit more of where I’m—hang on …” The image changed to an exterior shot of the lab. He saw smoke belching up from a half-imploded ramshackle building in a barren desert. He looked at Dennis. “Nevada?”
“Yes. Good guess.”
“Thanks,” Marco said. “Okay, this I can work with.” He made sure that he had his own phone secure inside a closed pocket of his tactical vest, then stood up and nodded to Tom and Diana.
“Back in a few,” he said.
Then he stared deeply into the grainy video on the phone’s LCD screen. His eyes saw through the moving image, and the edges of his vision blurred, until all that he could see was the baked-white sand and sun-bleached sky of the desert …
Marco blinked and squinted against the desert sun.
It felt as if there was as much heat radiating up from the runway tarmac at his feet as there was beating down on him from above. The combination of direct and reflected sunlight was blinding, and painful pricklings needled his exposed skin.
This is what it feels like to get cooked alive, he mused.
The sand-scoured wooden shack that hid the entrance to the secret Haspelcorp lab was dozens of yards away. As in the recorded video on Dennis’s phone, it continued to spew smoke through rents in its roof of rusted, corrugated metal.
Eager to get out of the sun, Marco walk-jogged toward the dilapidated building. His footsteps slapped against the paved runway surface, making a tiny sound that was all but lost in the vast, lonely spaces of the deep desert. It was difficult for Marco to move so quickly in such dry, brutal heat, but he feared that if he slowed his pace or stopped to rest, the soles of his sneakers would melt under his feet.
He reached the shack. Littering the ground by the entrance were a few small bits of metallic debris. Some of the pieces’ edges were straight and clean; others were scorched and melted. Though he didn’t know what to make of them offhand, he suspected they might be worth analyzing later. He gathered the pieces, stuffed them into his pants pockets, then moved on to the shack.
He tried to open the door and tore it from its corroded and heat-warped hinges. Part of the wall fell away with it, reduced to a smoldering slab of charcoal. It broke into dusty black cinders at his feet.
“Construction by the lowest bidder,” he mumbled, even though the joke was solely for his own ears. Something about the profound emptiness of the landscape that surrounded him made Marco want to talk to himself.
Edging through the door, he paused to let his eyes adjust to the shadows inside the shack. Ahead of him, the fire had exposed and destroyed what looked like some high-tech security devices mounted inside the wall. Next to them was another half-disintegrated door, beyond which was a short hallway.
Everything inside the shack stank of burnt wood.
Marco pushed the sliding door open. It caught on something in its glide track. The grinding noise it produced made Marco suspect that it was ashes or other debris deposited by the fire. With effort he shoved it through the obstruction, opening the portal fully. He was rewarded with a faceful of smoke that stung his eyes until they watered.
Waving away the acrid cloud, Marco walked with caution down the corridor, testing each floorboard’s integrity before trusting it with his full weight. A few boards answered his steps with ominous creaks, but the path felt solid.
Another open doorway at the end of the hall led to an elevator shaft, but there was no elevator. Perched at the edge, Marco stole a look down the shaft, which fell away into total darkness. To either side of him were motor housings that had likely controlled the elevator car, but they appeared to be warped and blackened, and their cables were missing.
Looking around, Marco muttered, “I guess some stairs would be a bit too much to ask for.” He cast another stare into the seemingly bottomless abyss. “No, let’s just have an elevator be the only way to the lab. What could possibly go wrong?”
He unsnapped the flap on one of his tactical vest’s many pockets. “Let’s see who’s laughing now, Dennis,” he said as he dug out four glow sticks that were tied together with a spare shoelace. With simple bending motions, he activated the flexible plastic rods. As the chemicals inside them mixed, they gave off a ghostly but intense white light. “That’ll do,” he said, then dropped them down the elevator shaft.
They fell almost directly straight down, with what seemed to Marco like surreal slowness, but he timed their fall with his watch at just over four seconds. Doing the math in his head, he concluded that the sticks had fallen roughly three hundred feet.
“Let’s have a look at what’s down there,” he said to himself while retrieving a pair of compact but powerful binoculars from another bulging pouch on the front of his vest. He wrapped the field glasses’ strap around his wrist to keep from dropping them, then laid down beside the shaft’s edge.
Aiming the binoculars toward the distant glow sticks, he adjusted the focus until he had a sharp image of the bottom of the shaft. It was filled with the wreckage of the elevator car. Checking the sides, he saw a gap in one wall that he suspected would lead into the hidden laboratory.
He pictured himself prone atop a level portion of the wrecked elevator car …
… and then he was there.
God, I love teleporting, he thought with a broad grin as he clambered down off the mangled elevator car. Grabbing the glow sticks, he took a few careful steps into the lab. He coughed as he inhaled more toxic-smelling smoke. Somewhat belatedly, he hoped that the fumes in the lab weren’t laced with deadly chemicals or radioactive particles. Too late now, he figured.
Moving through the lab, he felt suffocated both by the heat and the odor of gasoline. The smell was strongest in the areas that seemed to be the flashpoints of the fire.
Multiple ignition points and the presence of accelerant: those two factors alone would have been enough to suggest arson even if the scientists hadn’t already absconded with the warhead they had built. Adding to Marco’s certainty that the lab had been deliberately destroyed was the rather uniform manner in which all of its computers had been smashed and piled together in the center of one workroom.
“Subtle, guys,” Marco said sotto voce. “Real subtle.”
He wandered from one room to the next, searching for more clues, no
matter how trivial they might appear.
The blaze had scoured the lab of almost every scrap of paper. Glass beakers and vials had melted. Even most of the metal had been deformed by the extreme heat.
In a room that he guessed had served as one of the scientists’ temporary quarters, he saw the corner of a book on a table partly covered by a toppled locker. He climbed awkwardly over the locker to examine the book. Its front cover was seared black and its pages had been half consumed by fire, but its back cover was only slightly browned. Delicately, he opened it just enough to see what kind of tome it was.
It was a world atlas.
Marco pulled the book free from under the fallen locker cabinet and saw something else on the desk: a small rock. He reached over and picked it up. It was feather-light. Turning it in his fingers, he saw that it was oddly shaped and pitted with small cavities. Must be volcanic, he concluded. Interesting.
He stuffed the rock in a pocket apart from the metal he’d found outside the shack and tucked the burnt book under his arm. It wasn’t much, but he suspected there wasn’t anything else in the lab that was worth finding.
“Homeward bound,” he said, taking out his wallet and flipping it open to a photo of the NTAC Theory Room.
Staring at the image of his home-away-from-home, he knew he would momentarily be there.
“I don’t know how I could’ve doubted you, Marco,” Dennis said, in a tone so neutral that Tom knew it had to be sarcasm. “You’ve really blown this thing wide open.”
Marco sat, arms folded, eyebrows knitting together with sullen indignation, at his desk in the Theory Room. Tom, Jed, Diana, and Dennis had come downstairs at his request after he had returned from the Haspelcorp lab several minutes earlier.
Dennis poked at the volcanic rock on Marco’s desk. “I mean, these are the clues we were waiting for: a pebble, some scrap metal, and an atlas that’s been used for kindling. Nice work.”
“Fifteen minutes ago we didn’t have anything,” Diana said to him. “All we knew was that you got duped into helping three fanatics from the future build a doomsday weapon. And in case you forgot, you came here looking for help from us. So why don’t you do yourself a favor and shut up?”