Hart, who was leaning against the bridge’s entryway, nudged himself straight.
“We’re glad too,” Jack said, eyeing the SEAL, who probably wasn’t used to hearing computers talk about feelings.
“It would have been nice if Dr. Viswanathan had been here,” she went on.
Jack swiveled to face her. “You miss him?”
“I believe so. Though I am sure he will regret not being here for the breakthrough.”
His back straightened, the pitch of his voice peaking with excitement. “What breakthrough? Have you cracked the alien language?”
“Not all of it,” she corrected him. “Enough, however, to know you are sitting in the navigator’s seat.”
Jack was about to pull Anna into a hug when the consoles began to flicker. That ringing came to his ears again, a low throbbing sound as though a giant electrical transformer were charging up before a massive release. He thought of Gabby and the others in the submersible, hopeful they’d had enough time to get away. Then the blast came and Jack was no longer worried about the others’ safety. He was suddenly worried about his own.
Chapter 55
Rain pelted the safehouse windows, drawing streaks along the glass. Now back in Amsterdam, Mia was feeling upbeat and energized in spite of the soggy weather outside. No doubt about it, she was hopeful that the number thirty-seven might soon prove useful in their search for a solution to the worldwide health crisis. Of course, it was easy to assume that only humans had a stake in the discovery, but a handful of animal species were also showing signs. And not just any animals. Most of them were creatures that shared our personal space. Tests had revealed that certain farm animals and house pets also had Salzburg in their genome. And yet few if any wild animals bore the extra chromatid, except for bears, raccoons and crows. But even there, those three lived in relative close proximity to humans. Somewhere was the missing link and Mia was determined to find it.
As soon as they had arrived, Mia had contacted Dr. Jansson to get an update. The two women had spoken for close to thirty minutes. Under different circumstances this was an exchange of information that would normally have occurred via email, but with Sentinel actively hunting them, an encrypted sat phone was the only safe option.
Following Mia’s departure, Dr. Jansson’s lab had taken her suggestions to heart while adding a few touches of their own. For starters, they decided rather than co-opting the body’s immune system to deliver the HAC, they would instead use a retroviral vector. This meant repurposing a virus—such as VSV G-pseudotyped lentivirus—and coating it with proteins. Normally this was the preferred method among geneticists since VSV infected a large range of cells.
Mia had considered this option, but had worried that only humans could be treated and not the millions of animals who were also suffering from the disorder. Hesitations aside, Mia understood that where first steps were concerned, one needed to start somewhere.
But introducing the HAC into the body’s cells was only part of the challenge. The larger issue was figuring out which genes might stop Salzburg dead in its tracks.
For that, Jansson’s lab turned to a solution already found in nature. Female mammals carried a gene called XIST designed to silence one of the two X chromosomes women carried inside of them. Jansson’s team duplicated the gene and reprogrammed the copy—naming it XIST2. When introduced, XIST2 would produce an RNA molecule that coated the surface of the forty-seventh chromatid, Salzburg, and effectively block its genes from being expressed.
So far, the limited test run had shown terrific and almost immediate results. For many patients, the new gene therapy was like flipping a light switch. But there was one more piece of good news from Dr. Jansson and it made all of the hardship Mia had faced these last few days feel worth it.
Tom entered her room with the sat phone. Mia pushed her back against the headboard as he handed it to her.
“Hello?”
“Mommy?”
Mia’s heart leapt. She laughed, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh, honey, you had us so worried.” Tom had apparently left a special order for Dr. Jansson that if she deemed it safe, she was to include Mia’s daughter in the initial round of testing.
“Daddy says I was sick.”
“I know, sweetie,” she said, crying and laughing at the same time. “He’s right, you were very sick, but you’re better now. And that’s all that matters.”
“When are you coming home?”
Mia bit down on her lip. “As soon as I can.”
When they were done, Tom took the phone and left the room. Wiping at her eyes, Mia was struck by just how strange Tom sometimes acted. Some moments he was capable of extreme kindness, like when he’d instructed Dr. Jansson to include Zoey in the first round of an expedited gene therapy trial. And yet he had also watched as her eyes filled with tears without offering so much as a…
Sven stood before her, holding out a box of Kleenex. A single tissue fluttered gently in the breeze from the ceiling fan.
“Thank you,” she said, taking one and blowing her nose. There was no polite way of going about the act if you intended to do the job properly. He twitched as she gave it a final honk. She leaned back, dabbing away the last few specks. “I really needed that.”
He settled onto the end of her bed, the springs of her mattress whining in protest.
Mia’s gaze drifted slightly. “I’m not sure I’ll ever have my family back,” she told him, happy to have someone who knew how to listen. “Least, not the way things used to be.”
He regarded her intently, the corners of his eyes curved downward like the sad eyes of a Saint Bernard.
“You know, they say life is like being at sea in a very small boat. The wind and the waves will push you all over. Up and down, left and right. Sometimes it gets so bad all you see are giant watery hands falling on top of you, trying to flip you over and drag you to the bottom. Then before you know it, you’re cresting the wave, high above it all, and for a moment you can breathe again. I guess it’s mostly true. Peaks and valleys, you know.”
Sven’s head tilted slightly.
“My life has mostly been chaos interrupted by brief moments of order. Paul represented that order for me. And for a while I was good at it. But I kept asking myself when that other shoe was gonna drop. Kept wondering when the chaos was gonna come surging back in to pull me down and sink my boat. Figured it was only a matter of time.” Mia let out a humorless spate of laughter. “You know how I got myself through school?”
The big man shook his head.
“I was a nude model.” Images from the past whizzed by at supersonic speeds. Mia cackled and this time the joy was real. “Yeah, I took my clothes off for students in painting classes. Wasn’t easy at first, but I sure as hell wasn’t gonna wait tables. I’d already tried that one and it left me with nothing but shin splints and sore feet. The money modeling wasn’t bad either. Only problem was the professor. He didn’t give off the sleazeball vibe, not at first. But I caught the way his eyes lingered a little too long. And he was no spring chicken either. The man had eyebrows with more volume than some men have on their scalp. The clincher was when he asked me out. You’re in a rough spot at that age. Pissing your boss off is never a great strategy, believe me. Needless to say, I told him no. He stopped bothering me after that. In fact, he stopped calling altogether. I’d been working those modeling gigs for two full semesters before he built up the courage and then couldn’t take the rejection. I was forced to find a private school in town. I never realized it then, but there was something in me that drove older men wild. Paul is older than me by five years and Alan by at least twenty. Maybe that’s what I should study next, when this is all over. The encrypted language of the human libido.” She laughed again and so did Sven. “You’re easy to talk to. I suppose that’s because I know a guy who doesn’t speak will never go blabbing my business to Tom or anyone else who’ll listen.”
He slid his index finger and thumb across his lips in a zipper gesture.
“Your secrets are safe with me.” His voice was so deep it seemed to rumble.
Mia’s eyes saucered. “Whaaa? You speak?”
“Course he speaks,” Tom said from the doorway, a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. She could tell by the devilish look on his face he was loving this far too much. “What’d you think, the big man was mute?”
“Um, kinda.”
“He doesn’t fancy talking, that’s all,” Tom clarified. “But that doesn’t mean the man’s incapable of the act.” He winked. “And don’t worry, I didn’t hear a thing about your days as a nude model.”
Mia was still processing her surprise over Sven’s ability to speak and the voice that came with it when the room disappeared in a flashbulb of pain. Each of them rubbed at their eyes, blinking away any lingering white spots from their vision. This was the third event in less than a week. And it was after each that more and more people had begun showing symptoms of that rare genetic disorder she’d been fighting so hard to understand and stop dead in its tracks. But even before her sight had been fully restored, a concern had popped into Mia’s mind, one she couldn’t let go of. How would the HACs they’d implanted in the gene therapy test subjects hold out?
And more to the point, was Zoey still okay?
Chapter 56
An uneasy look passed between Mia, Tom and Sven.
“Those flashes are coming sooner each time,” Mia said, rising to her feet. “We need to find out where they’re coming from and how to stop them. And I want each of the test subjects closely monitored for any signs of backsliding.”
Sven agreed and left to see to her last point.
If there had been any wheels turning in her mind over the prime number Lars had given them, the wheels had since ground to a halt. Even if the gene therapy they had administered managed to hold, she knew this latest event meant that a whole slew of new patients would require treatment.
“Haven’t your people figured out where this is coming from?” she asked. “I thought you used to be part of Sentinel.”
Tom bristled at Mia’s comment. “Where Sentinel has hundreds and maybe even thousands of agents and personnel, we have dozens and nowhere near the cash.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry.” They were all frustrated.
“We’ve been monitoring as many of Sentinel’s lines of communication as we can,” Tom told her. “If they know, they’re either being very quiet about it or they’re passing the info along by means we aren’t aware of.”
Mia had an idea. “How about you cut out the middleman?”
“Ignore Sentinel?” Tom was not liking the idea.
“Don’t ignore them, but shift some of your assets. You guys keep following Sentinel and you’ll always be a few steps behind. Look how long it took you to find me.”
He shook his head, although the glare in his eye spoke volumes. She was right and he knew it. “So what are you proposing?”
“There must be satellites from the military as well as NASA that monitor these sorts of things. Have your people hack in and see what they can find.” It was far too much of a coincidence to believe that the discovery of that alien ship and the explosion of Salzburg weren’t somehow related. Finding that ship and putting an end to the flashes mutating our DNA had become her top priority.
•••
Tom returned two hours later with some news. She grew worried when he refused to make eye contact with her.
“Did your people find anything?” she asked, not sure if she wanted to hear the answer.
He handed her a number of satellite printouts. The first image showed a spot off what appeared to be the Yucatán Peninsula. The next showed an oil rig surrounded by a half-dozen US Navy ships.
“What you’re seeing started out as an expedition led by a geophysicist named Dr. Jack Greer and an astrophysicist named Dr. Gabby Bishop. From what our hackers and sources close to the Navy were able to uncover, these scientists were digging for a meteorite when they found the ship. The moment of discovery matches up with the very first flash.”
“They must have woken it up,” Mia said almost to herself.
Tom regarded her quizzically. “Woken it up?”
“It may have taken some time, but don’t you see? Whoever left that ship behind wanted us to find it.”
“But why?”
Mia’s eyes searched the room as her mind raced. “Who knows? Maybe they were waiting until we were ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “But that’s what worries me.” Her gaze fell on Tom again. “When do we head to Mexico?”
“I’m not sure. We’re using our contacts in the Navy I mentioned to reach out to the task force in the Gulf. Needless to say, it’s been extremely difficult. The whole area’s under lockdown and patrolled by an armada of warships, not all of them American.”
Every sector of people’s lives was being affected by these events. And it wasn’t merely those suffering medically. The corners of the political, religious and economic fabric of society were becoming more than frayed. They were being torn apart. And they would soon find themselves in a state that civilizations throughout history had sought to stave off. That state was one of chaos.
The slippery slope between order and chaos was well understood, even among the ancient Egyptians, and more recently in parts of the world such as Venezuela, Mogadishu and Syria. Only recently had the West gotten a fresh taste of it.
“All I need is for you to get me on the phone with someone,” Mia told him, wringing her hands. “Give me a chance to explain we have a piece of the puzzle they can’t do without. If these symptoms are occurring all over the world, then surely the Navy has been affected as well.”
Tom nodded, clearly hesitant about the next bit of news he had. “There’s something else.” Everything about his body language told her he wished he could stop now.
“P-please tell me it isn’t about Zoey,” she stammered, pushing against the knot that was forcing its way up her throat.
His eyes flickered with sadness.
“She’s relapsed again, hasn’t she?”
He remained quiet. But his silence said enough.
•••
More hours passed as Mia tried to distract herself from the heartache tearing at her insides.
Tom entered with the sat phone and handed it to her.
Please don’t let it be Paul with more bad news. With an almost imperceptible wince, she brought it to her ear.
“Hello, Dr. Ward. This is Jack Greer.”
Chapter 57
After a rather surprising conversation with Dr. Mia Ward, Jack headed for the bridge. Apparently, seismic surveys conducted by the military confirmed a stubborn outcropping of limestone was the only thing keeping the ship from plummeting into the depths. If the countdown started again, they’d been ordered to follow the emergency protocol—which was to say, they were to head to the Orb, release it from the forward airlock and then fill the habitat’s ballast tanks with compressed air in the hopes they might make it to the surface in time.
Like his introduction to Mia, the Navy’s escape plan left Jack feeling less than optimistic. As for the geneticist, she had confirmed several of his emerging hypotheses: namely, that the blast waves were affecting people on a genetic level and that the intensity was growing stronger with each event. She was adamant they needed to be stopped at any cost.
Mia made cryptic comments about a group she said was out to stop any attempts at initiating first contact with an alien race. Any other time she might have sounded like a member of the tinfoil hat brigade, but Jack was quick to recall his conversation with Rajesh and the virus planted in Anna’s software by a group calling themselves Sentinel.
If she could get here in time, Jack was confident her background in genetics would be of great service.
But there was another subject she had mentioned, one that had intrigued him a great deal. She said the genetic mutation appearing in people contained some sort o
f message. That after decoding it, Sentinel agents had leaked it to the media. She’d been talking about the ‘MAN WILL FALL’ Jack had heard from news reports. Perhaps the more surprising news was that Mia had begun to doubt the results of her own decryption. She claimed to have discovered a key that with the right algorithm might reveal something entirely different.
Even after Jack had explained the dangers, he was impressed with how quickly she had accepted his invitation to come help. It spoke to her bravery, sure, but it also told him she had an emotional stake in finding answers before the ship slipped away forever.
He’d informed her that a military transport was ready to fly her here from Europe, the details of which he would leave for the Secretary of Defense and his staff.
For now, he had other fish to fry.
Jack was scaling the final ramp to the bridge when he glanced to his left and noticed the trail of fuchsia and powder-blue colored lights dancing up the ship’s central column. He passed through the archway a moment later and spotted Anna, perched before one of the consoles.
She perked up at his arrival. “Dr. Greer, you will be pleased to know that things are progressing nicely.”
“No kidding!” he said, exuberant. “You got the elevator working. Anna, you are truly amazing. When Rajesh first unveiled you, I gotta say I wasn’t sure.” His expression softened. “I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”
Her digital cheeks flushed. “Those are kind words, Dr. Greer, and they are greatly appreciated.” She pointed to the panel. “I should let you know that the master controls for many of the ship’s functions can be accessed through this terminal.” She paused and her expression turned quizzical. “Please forgive my intrusiveness, but I accessed your personnel file on the rig’s servers.”
“Those are meant to be private,” Jack said, unclear where this was going. “Why’d you do that?”
“Curiosity, I suppose. There did not appear to be a restriction on the information.”
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