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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  The small gray handset on the table chirped. Ironwood squinted at its display. J.R. was in the hall. About time.

  David wasn’t finished with him, though.

  “However, if you think aliens came here fifty million years ago and engineered the DNA of some primate knowing . . . knowing . . . that they were setting into motion a chain of events that would end up with modern humans—you’re not talking about aliens, or science. You’re into the supernatural. Divine intervention.”

  Ironwood waved a hand at David—they’d pick this up again, soon—and tapped an entry code into the handset. The odor of stale smoke and alcohol entered with his son.

  He held out David’s hard drive to J.R. “Deliver this.”

  J.R. took it from him. “This his?” He cocked his head in David’s direction.

  “It’s mine,” Ironwood said.

  “Right. I’ll take it down.”

  “You do that.”

  As if he thought the meeting had ended with J.R.’s departure, Merrit was on his feet before the door had closed.

  David stayed seated. “You know, maybe if you tell me how you’re processing my data, I can give it to you a different way. A better way.”

  Ironwood heaved himself to his feet. He needed to get down to the Red Room, tell Keisha he knew where to start her search for outpost number four. “I got that covered, Dave—but thanks.”

  David stood up, too, carefully placing his half-full glass of cola on the table. “Have to admit I’m curious, though. I mean, you and I are using the same data, but I’m only finding areas. You’re finding outposts.”

  “Not your concern, son. Just stick to what you’re doing.”

  David finally took the hint. “No problem. Forget I even asked. Stand by for cluster five.”

  Now Ironwood was curious. It had always been “if” and “maybe” before with his young researcher. “I thought these clusters were hard to find. What’s changed?”

  “Well, one cluster could have been a statistical fluke. Two, same thing. Now that we’re up to four, I’m guessing there’s a pattern.”

  As they walked together to the foyer and the suite’s private elevator, Ironwood felt the glow of satisfaction. “Well, now, if there’s a pattern, Dave—and I guarantee you’ll find there is—there’s only one reason for it. Aliens.”

  David held up his hand as if signaling a stop, then split his fingers between ring and middle. “Then all I can say is, Live long and prosper.”

  Ironwood chuckled, then put out a hand to restrain Merrit before he could leave. “You’ll stay and we’ll talk.”

  Merrit’s eyes were locked on the young researcher.

  “You two have plans?” Ironwood asked.

  “No,” Merrit answered.

  “Good. Dave, don’t go back to work just yet. Relax. Go see the show downstairs. Call Ellie and she’ll get you a ticket. Got a suit with you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Go down to Berlatti’s. Tell Tony I said to fix you up.”

  Ironwood watched the elevator doors close on David before he turned to Merrit.

  “Anything I should know about you and Dave?”

  “I had to finesse the robbery at his off-site lab, but I kept the company in the clear.”

  “It was just a robbery, right?”

  Merrit answered without hesitation. “No question. The police reports I saw, they seem to think it’s a gang that specializes in high-end lab equipment. Steal it here, resell in Europe. No interest in computers.”

  There was something Merrit wasn’t telling him, Ironwood was certain, but experience had taught him that, if pressed, the security chief would just give his standard reply: The less his employer knew about certain events that might edge the law, the better. Plausible deniability by any other name.

  Ironwood headed back to the sofa. “Here, I want to show you something.”

  He rifled through the newspapers scattered around the sofa and found Sunday’s Boston Globe. It was already folded open to the obituaries. He tapped one entry.

  “You know anything about this?”

  Merrit dutifully scanned the obituary indicated.

  Ironwood had already read it several times. Florian MacClary. Philanthropist. Adventurer. Noted archaeologist. Coronary in Tahiti. The small photo the paper ran was from twenty years ago. She’d been a knockout.

  “She was on your tail, wasn’t she?”

  Merrit shook his head. “I knew their foundation was down there. I didn’t know she was with them.” He handed the paper back.

  Ironwood wasn’t through with him. “You see the date she died? They were only a few days behind you, at most. Took them a year to figure out where we found the outpost in India and get the government to turn it over to their dig team. Nearly two months before they got up to the one in the Andes. But this time, the MacCleirighs almost got to this one before you did. How’s that possible?”

  Merrit studied him as if coming to some decision. “I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure. I believe they have someone on the inside.”

  “You saying one of our people has sold out to them?”

  A slight smile twisted Merrit’s face.

  “Not one of ours. Yours. David Weir.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  David wanted to run but couldn’t yet, and walking slowly, the South Tower corridor seemed endless. As soon as the door to his high-roller suite closed behind him and he was out of range of cameras, he raced to the cabinet in the dining alcove where he’d set up a transmitter—just another odd electronic component among many, nothing anyone would notice.

  Two days after meeting Agent Lyle, he’d installed on his computer a tracking program, originally designed to monitor warehouse inventory. Just before leaving the suite with Merrit, he’d switched on the program’s transmitter. Since then, it had sent out a query radio signal every five seconds, each query answered in turn by a self-powered RFID, a radio-frequency-identification tag. Half the size of a credit card, the tag was hidden inside the hard drive he’d delivered to Ironwood, and Ironwood had passed on to J.R. The same hard drive given him by Jack Lyle.

  The air force already knew Ironwood was buying geographical data from David, to find his outposts, and now they wanted to know where the data were being processed. That’s what the tagged hard drive was supposed to tell them.

  It was all that Lyle had said, but it was enough. As soon as he’d been set up in Ironwood’s resort hotel, David had taken apart the air force hard drive without breaking the tamper seal he knew would be there.

  Examining the RFID tag inside the drive had been easier—it was an off-the-shelf model modified with a longer-lasting battery. That accounted for its relatively large size. Standard RFID tags, like the ones hidden in casino high-denomination chips, were considerably smaller. Some were barely visible to the human eye. That size of tag, however, was only possible if batteries and transmitters weren’t required—in effect, reducing the tags to little more than passive reflectors of whatever radio frequencies were beamed at them.

  Fortunately, the outsized air force model in Jack Lyle’s hard drive was active—capable of transmitting a signal under its own power—and that made it modifiable. Now it was transmitting on frequencies different from the ones the air force would be monitoring, presumably from a vehicle they’d parked near Ironwood’s casino.

  Despite altering the air force’s tag, David had complied with what Agent Lyle wanted and had delivered the tagged hard drive into Ironwood’s hands. Not doing so would mean the government would bring charges of economic espionage against him. What he didn’t intend to do was share what he learned immediately. Not till he discovered what Ironwood learned from his fourth data cluster, because that was what Jess MacClary wanted to know. In exchange, she’d promised to tell him how she knew there were twelve clusters—and that information might save his life.

  Ironwood, Lyle, Jess, and me, David thought. All interested in the same thing: something buried in his data. But only
he knew the first nonhuman DNA sequences he’d discovered were his own. That meant that until he knew who he was, or what he was, and how to escape the death sentence encoded in his genes, all three of his employers were going to have to wait.

  In the dining alcove of his high-roller suite, David sat hunched forward over his computer, fingers flying across the keyboard to bring up the RFID tracking log on the monitor. The twelve queries and responses each minute for the past hour were recorded in columns of numbers. Though he could have mapped the tag’s position visually, he’d decided not to have anything on-screen that anyone else might recognize. Besides, from Encounters tourist casino maps and the emergency-exit plans posted on every floor of the North and South hotel towers, he’d already built up a mental picture of the complete resort.

  Guided by the coordinate numbers of each query and response, David began placing corresponding dots on his mind’s-eye layout, tracing J.R’s route after exiting the Roswell Suite, descending in the private elevator to the casino’s main floor, across the gaming area and . . . where?

  He visualized the casino’s marketplace—a long sweeping thoroughfare, like that in an indoor shopping mall, where the lucky few regularly surrendered casino winnings for overpriced luxury goods. J.R. had walked partway along that sweep, taken a turn, headed in a straight line, and then—

  For just over a minute, the signals didn’t change location.

  Waiting for another elevator?

  Then two more signals—the beginning of another straight-line movement.

  The signals cut out.

  The conclusion was obvious.

  J.R. was in a shielded area, screened to prevent the detection of electromagnetic radiation from whatever was inside. It was a standard security measure for sensitive computer installations, which meant—

  Success. The air force’s tagged hard drive had done exactly what Agent Lyle had wanted it to do: It was in Ironwood’s secret data-processing center, where Ironwood was somehow extracting specific locations from the general regions David’s genetic clusters indicated.

  He visualized again the resort’s layout, J.R.’s path, and—

  He pushed back from the computer. He’d seen exactly where to go next.

  The casino’s test facility. What the staff called the Red Room.

  Merrit was annoyed but not surprised to see Ironwood’s son already in Encounter’s surveillance center. When it came to security issues involving Ironwood’s personal projects, only he and J.R. were cleared to handle them.

  Dominating the room was a state-of-the-art video-switching console where five operators busily monitored a bank of twenty surveillance screens. Presented on those screens was a constantly changing montage of views from the hundreds of cameras that watched the casino’s lobbies, corridors, and gaming activities. The position of most cameras directed at the public areas was fixed, but in the gaming areas, false ceilings hid a network of “eye-in-the-sky” cameras, any of which could be moved to cover any table, any slot machine, anytime.

  Merrit pulled J.R. aside, out of earshot of the operators, to deliver the story he’d worked up when he’d returned to Weir’s high-roller suite and found him gone.

  “Your father wants us to watch Weir. If he tries to leave the hotel, we bring him back. If he makes a phone call, we listen in. If he passes anything to anyone, we go get it. He left his suite about eight minutes ago. We’re here because we lost him on the main floor and we’re waiting for the system to pick him up again.”

  J.R. shrugged. “Okay by me.”

  Merrit returned to the video console. As a standard procedure, the surveillance center automatically scanned every camera’s signal using Viisage facial-recognition software. The goal was to identify known casino cheats and VIPs, as well as to keep a record of returning customers. Now, on Merrit’s order, the Viisage operators bypassed the automatic-scan function and directed the software to look only at video from the main floor—every frame.

  Five minutes earlier, the system had tracked Weir from his suite to the gaming floor, then lost him as he entered the crowded retail area.

  Five minutes more and J.R. became restless with the lack of progress. “He’s probably quit the building already.”

  Accepting the idea, not its author, Merrit instructed the operators to pull video of the past ten minutes for all casino entrances—even those backstage away from publicly accessible areas—starting with the main entrance lobby, where taxis and limousines queued and hotel guests arrived.

  The Viisage software obediently began locking onto every face that appeared, overlaying each with lines and dots to isolate distinct features, matching each resulting mathematical profile with that derived from the photos of Weir taken for his resort keycard.

  No match.

  Still, Merrit was patient. No one could beat casino odds forever. Not even David Weir.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Today the Red Room leader’s T-shirt read, WHAT PART OF ΔxΔp≥½h DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? Ironwood didn’t understand any of it, but appreciated the humor of its message even more as a result.

  As Keisha Harrill typed in the location he’d given her, Ironwood watched letters begin appearing in the search window on the Red Room’s nine-foot screen. Not that any other members of her team were paying close attention. Frank, the flannel-shirted mathematician, was arranging M&M’s in patterns on the lunch table. Two of the other six technicians stared into workstation screens dense with indecipherable symbols, while the other four were deep into some computer game involving armored soldiers blasting away at unarmored aliens.

  “That it?” Keisha asked, finishing. “Tintagel?”

  “Ground zero,” Ironwood confirmed.

  “Okay,” Keisha said, “the new cluster’s probable range covers more than a thousand square miles. Any particular reason we start at this specific spot?”

  “Historic resonance. It’s the birthplace of King Arthur. So the legends say.” He added the last sentence so she wouldn’t have to.

  Keisha smiled. “Bringing up the satellite.”

  On the main screen, a section of the Cornish coast materialized. From a virtual altitude of about a mile, the aerial image looked to Ironwood like a jigsaw puzzle piece with two small promontories separated by a gouged-out shoreline.

  “Rough and rocky, boss. Any specific place we should begin?”

  “The castle ruins.”

  “And they are where, exactly?”

  “Eastern edge of the westernmost peninsula, smack-dab where it joins the shore.”

  “Smack-dab it is.” Keisha manipulated her remote control.

  The aerial image expanded, centering on the area Ironwood had just described, and he found himself looking at blocky white patches—stone walls, their outline defined by shadows against a rectangular base, also white, that stood out against dry brown ground. The stored satellite image was softened by its extreme magnification, as if the viewpoint were from only a few hundred feet above target.

  Keisha shot him a questioning glance. “Compared to some of the other sites we’ve checked, that doesn’t look old enough.”

  “It’s not. The earl of Cornwall built it in 1233. But don’t forget what they all did back then. One big dog after another, marking each other’s territory.”

  “There’s something underneath?”

  “Veritable layer cake of goodies. Seems the earl knew all about the legends of Arthur having come from there, so he had his castle built in an old-fashioned style, even for then. Before that, it was a Celtic fortress or maybe a monastery . . . something with religious significance. Before that, it was Roman.”

  Keisha had already created a crosshairs overlay on the castle ruins and was expanding the image again when she stopped. “We talking about searching in the same time frame as the other sites? Nine thousand years, more or less?”

  “I would think so. Why?”

  “Sea level was a lot lower.”

  Ironwood knew that. “End of the last ice age.”
>
  “Remember Polynesia? That atoll was underwater.”

  “Because of a volcanic eruption.”

  “Well, that probably contributed to the change in elevation, but nine thousand years ago, sea level was maybe sixty, seventy feet lower than it is today.”

  “You think we should start this search underwater?”

  Keisha turned back to the screen and tapped the remote against her open hand. “Thinking about the one in India . . . the pathways leading up to it . . . the way it was positioned to look over the river that used to be there . . . If we’re talking about the same philosophy of building, and we’re thinking there’s an outpost in this area, I wouldn’t look for it under the castle.”

  “Where, then?”

  Ironwood watched the large screen as she used the remote again and the aerial image shrank, then shifted until the crosshairs fell over a striking rectangular gouge in the coastline, almost exactly between the two peninsulas.

  “Take a look at the color of the water.”

  Ironwood saw what she meant. In the span between the promontories, a distance of about a mile, the sea was a pale milky blue. Just off the tips of both, it changed almost instantly to the dark green cast of deep ocean.

  “You think the outpost’s somewhere between the two promontories?”

  “That’s where I would’ve built docks and warehouses,” Keisha said. “But . . . if I was going to build an outpost like the one in India, this is where I’d carve in the paths leading from the docks to the site.”

  The crosshairs shifted again, moved over the rectangular gouge.

  Ironwood stared at the small smudge that was the ruins of the castle, built over the ruins of the fortress where King Arthur might have been born. It would be so satisfying to find an alien outpost under those ruins—but there was a reason he paid Keisha as much as he did.