Oracle's Hunt

by A. Claire Everward

  His arm came up around her waist. He held her lightly to him and kissed her on her temple again. She didn’t resist him, and she wasn’t hazy this time. “There’s that kiss again,” she said quietly, flustered in a whole different way this time.

  “When this is over,” he murmured in her ear, “when you can focus on me and on what I’m doing, I’m going to kiss you properly. That’s a promise.”

  His phone beeped. He took it off his belt and glanced at it. “It’s Scholes. They’re ready for you in Mission Command,” he told Lara. She nodded and pointed to her earpiece. She already knew.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A swipe of Lara’s hand, and her entire office showed IDSD Missions’ symbol again, securing all information. She followed Donovan out and frowned as the two agents stationed at her office door moved to follow her.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Donovan said, stopping them. “But if she comes out of that door”—he indicated Mission Command—“without me, stop her.”

  Lara’s eyes narrowed. “You’re impossible.”

  “Get used to it,” he said mildly.

  “I’ll deal with you later.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Saved by Oracle, she thought as the heavy door to Mission Command opened and she walked inside, where Oracle was all that counted. Once again, all was as should be. She took it all in, felt herself focus. This was her turf.

  She approached the spanning wall screen, joining Scholes, who was standing on the operations platform before it, and acknowledged the people displayed on the screen. Martinez was there, as were Evans and his agency’s supervisory agent in charge of the search operations alongside Martinez, who introduced herself as Angela Bates, and Major General Oliver Grant, the joint operations commander of IDSD’s Air Force Global Strike and Defense Command that would be coordinating the attack on Elijahn’s headquarters, once it was found. Besides Lara, Scholes and Donovan, only the system operator coordinating the videoconference was physically present in Mission Command, sitting at her station on the far left of the screen.

  Bates began. “We found Elijahn’s transport. A private jet at a private-use airport southwest of DC. We’re still checking its registration. We also still need to check how they intended to leave US airspace, that airport is not a point of entry and they haven’t filed a flight plan, at least not yet. The pilots cracked easily, by the way. They had no interest in this, it was all money for them. The plane was heading for—get this—”

  “Lake Chad,” Lara said.

  “How did you know?” Bates had never worked with Lara and was not privy to Oracle’s existence.

  “Symbolic.” The plane itself was no surprise to Lara, it was a quick getaway. And once Elijahn had made the decision to abduct her, it would also have been the most convenient one—all he needed to do was land at the former site of his base, where he could have someone waiting to pick him up. Ironically, had he succeeded he would have brought to his base the very person behind its destruction.

  “Why wouldn’t he do what he did when he came here, head for an intermediate destination first, maybe switch transport? Didn’t he think we might get to the plane or the pilots, or be able to track its route even after it left?” Evans wasn’t entirely convinced.

  “The plane and the pilots were expendable. It was a one-way ticket for them, which is why Elijahn wouldn’t care what they saw. As for the route, this is Elijahn,” Lara said. She turned back to Bates. “Better make sure that plane isn’t moved before it’s manually checked. And not just electronically, he has people who know how to get around our technologies. You should find a signal jammer and a self-destruct device on it. Elijahn was going to prevent tracking and destroy the plane—get rid of the pilots too—once it reached its destination.”

  Bates stared at her. “I don’t know who you are, but I get the feeling I should be glad you’re on our side.” She signed off.

  “There wasn’t going to be a flight plan, was there?” Evans said.

  “No. No one was ever supposed to know he’s in the air. All he would need to worry about are other aircraft, and your agents will find an air traffic surveillance display on board. He would’ve disappeared. Not even satellites could have tracked him, not with the jammer he would have. And anyway, no one was supposed to be looking for him as we are, so disappearing would have been easier than it is now that we know who he is, and that he is being chased rather than leaving at his leisure.” She thought about it a bit. “Something should be done about that aircraft signal jamming, by the way.”

  They all agreed. Those jammers could pose a risk if they fell into the wrong hands, if they hadn’t already. Clearly technology would have to be developed that would render them useless.

  “You wouldn’t by any chance know where his headquarters is?” General Grant asked. He’d worked with Oracle many times before.

  “Yes,” she said, but first she turned her attention to Martinez. “Colonel, the three you’re looking for.”

  “We’re canvassing the area inch by inch. The way they disappeared, we’re worried they may be holed up somewhere. They might even be holding hostages, in a private residence, maybe, where they can hide. If they haven’t yet, they might hurt someone on the way.”

  “No. Elijahn thinks too much of himself, of his goals. He sees himself as being above the other militant groups and the old ways of terrorism. He would never risk being associated with their type of actions. And you won’t find them. Either they’re with Elijahn or two are dead, in which case you’ll find their bodies, and the remaining militant would be with Elijahn.”

  “Two are dead . . . ?” Donovan, who was standing beside the operations platform, was as confused as the rest of them.

  She turned to him, speaking confidently, not a hint of hesitation in her voice. “He already had his headquarters back when we attacked his base. That’s where he must have been during the base destruction, it’s where he would have brought the drone, where he was hidden all this time so that there wasn’t even a trace of him. And to keep the headquarters after his failure to carry out his plans, and to be able to plan his hunt for Oracle, do only this for so long, undisturbed and undetected, he had to still have had loyal followers. He would have killed those who doubted him, kept close to him those who would remain loyal, who would obey blindly. But keeping many militants quiet all this time isn’t easy, so he couldn’t have kept that many. Didn’t need many, either, at that point he would need mainly brains.

  “And coming here, he would have had to leave some of his militants behind, to watch over what’s really important to him, his only remaining stronghold, the headquarters. So the people he had here, either all of them were his or he handpicked additional hired guns with no previous loyalties that could stand in his way. But that type of hired guns goes with the promise of money and a strong hand to control them, not ideology, certainly not loyalty. And once the attack last night failed . . .”

  “Elijahn would need to get rid of the hired guns before they ran with his secrets or turned on him, and either way they would tell others that he failed.” Donovan said.

  Lara nodded. “Let’s assume some of his people here were, in fact, hired guns. Stands to reason that he would send to those he meant to kill in their homes, the easier jobs, if you will, Edwards and Miles, his more expendable people. If all the people he had here were his, then all those he sent to Edwards and Miles were his, and the three who had escaped would be at his side by now. But if he did bring with him a limited number of loyals and used hired guns, two of the three sent to Edwards and Miles each would have been a hired gun. The third would still have to have been a loyal, to ensure the job is done.” This was no assumption. She knew beyond doubt there were hired guns. She also knew it was two out of three in each group sent to the targets’ homes. But she had long ago learned that sometimes conventional logic was easier for those she spoke to, even if they knew her, even if they could, to an extent, accept that her mind was capable of g
oing different places than theirs.

  Martinez was quiet for a moment. “And if there are bodies, where would they be?”

  Lara tilted her head slightly. “In the immediate area where you found their SUV.”

  “We’ve searched.”

  “They’re there. Look again. Elijahn would need his loyal back, so if the others were hired guns, the loyal would have killed them as soon as he realized what happened and joined Elijahn, which only a loyal would know how to do.”

  “Got it. I’ll let you know what we find.” Martinez signed off.

  Donovan looked at Lara. “When the hell did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Find all the answers.”

  “I don’t have all the answers. Yet.”

  Someone cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Oracle?”

  She turned to the general.

  “You said something about headquarters?”

  “It’s in the Sahara.”

  Grant shook his head. “We’ve got eyes on Africa all the time, you of all people know that. We’re seeing nothing in the Sahara.”

  “Under,” she said.

  His jaw dropped.

  “Go back two years, to the Chad base. Look at the communication frequencies the pre-raid analysis showed. The unique signals Elijahn used in an attempt to avoid detection. The ones in the Sahara today are similar or somewhere around them. Think about it.” A contemplative frown crossed her brow. “But you would need to take into account frequency cancellations, he’s smarter now and wouldn’t risk being discovered. And he would also need to mask the signature of the holographic spot that is the access way to and from this underground place of his, something that can be accessed by either ground or aerial transport. Between these two, any signal would be less specific and far more dispersed.”

  Evans reached for his phone, but Lara said, “I’ve got our comms and joint intelligence teams on it already. They’ll try to find its whereabouts.”

  “One step ahead of us again, aren’t you?” Scholes said, shaking his head.

  “I’ll get the airstrike teams ready,” Grant said. “But we need Oracle to give us the exact coordinates. And fast. We have to assume that this is a time-sensitive mission. They already have too much information in that headquarters. And we can’t know if Elijahn has a way of passing them what he knows about you, or if he already did that, and if he gets to them and tells them to release it, or if they don’t hear from him and decide to expose the existence of Oracle themselves, the consequences will be the same. We need to erase that place.”

  She nodded. “Who’s doing this?”

  “We all are. It’s an alliance joint operation,” Scholes said beside her.

  On the screen, the general nodded in agreement. “We’ll all end this, protect Oracle together. It was our oversight that allowed Elijahn to survive these two years and get to you. Frank, I’ll let you know as soon as we have everything in place. I assume you would both like to see this through in person, of course.”

  “And we still need to find Elijahn,” Evans said, but Lara wasn’t listening to him or to Grant anymore. She was getting the information she requested from the comms team outside, in her earpiece.

  Forgetting those around her, she issued a series of commands to the mainframe, and the rotating globe from her office appeared at the rightmost section of the screen. But even as she walked toward it, she spoke again, and the view changed, zoomed in on Africa, bringing the entire continent into view, then zoomed farther in on Lake Chad and north of it, encompassing Sahel and the Sahara Desert. On the screen, frequencies began to flash—the fluctuating communication frequencies she had the teams outside identify. But they were too scattered, with too much interference, which she’d expected from Elijahn, and were rerouted too many times to global locations in an attempt to mask them, so that it was impossible to focus them, even with the probabilities the experienced minds just outside Mission Command had run. The area they tagged was too big, encompassing too much of the great desert, and since this was an underground base, an attack would have to be focused, powerful, to succeed. Worse, this was unfriendly territory, and so an attack would have to begin and end before local foes of the allies would be alerted.

  More quiet commands to the mainframe, and data appeared beside the image, running in multiple parallel columns. It came faster, denser, switching as she asked for more input. The only thing those in Mission Command with her could understand was that these were dates and coordinates, interspersed with other figures they couldn’t identify. But for her this data was so much more—it was the Chad base data from two years earlier, current pertinent data, and satellite and drone remote sensing data regularly stored in IDSD Missions’ mainframe.

  As Donovan and Scholes watched the data accelerated, moving fast, faster, a staggering amount of information running, reorganizing, changing at her command. And then, abruptly, it all went blank, all of it, the data and the map, as Oracle shut it all down. She just stood there, her eyes on the blank screen, her arms folded across her chest, her head tilted slightly, as if it was all still there. As if something was still there.

  And then she closed her eyes. In her mind, all that existed were images and numbers. Aerial, space. Layered, topographies. Depths, textures, geological data. That and more, information she had pulled from her available sources. Before, in her office, and now, to complement it. Memories of the Chad mission. Elijahn. His aspirations. His words to her. What she knew, what she still didn’t. She focused on the gaps, on what she didn’t know. Pushed the probabilities aside. Came up with her own. Took a mental step in a specific direction. Then another. Leaped. Opened her eyes. Gave a command.

  On the screen, the Sahara shone once again, empty, forlorn. A mark appeared on it. Beside it, a set of numbers. Coordinates. Depths. Tolerances. All changing fast, the small mark not resting for a moment as the tracking system marked every point in the great desert. Not a search. Just for her. She wanted to see them, the numbers, the points that, somewhere in the world, were real. Wanted to see the possibilities of where it could be. Of where what she wanted destroyed could be.

  She continued, her eyes not leaving the mark. Took one more step, another leap. It was there, it existed, had tangible spatial coordinates in this same reality where both she and it existed. It was there two years ago, when she had annihilated his base while he had looked on, hidden in it. It was there at the time of his attack on her, when it and her had been the center of his plan. It was where she was supposed to be taken by him, where she would have been right now, lost forever. It was right there, one of the locations being marked on the screen. All she had to do was go to it, be there, then. Exist where and when it existed. She could do it. Had to do it. Boundaries were there to be moved.

  The mark disappeared. Then reappeared immediately at a location hundreds of miles away, a set of numbers beside it. Longitude, latitude, depth.

  Elijahn’s headquarters was marked.

  On the screen to her left, Grant and Evans were watching this in their respective offices. As Oracle turned her eyes to them, they both nodded.

  “Got it, Oracle,” the general said with unhidden astonishment, even though he had seen her do so much, so many times before. Both he and Evans signed off.

  In Mission Command, now alone with those she allowed to care, Lara let go, took two stumbling steps forward and leaned her hand on the screen that rippled under her touch like an angry black sea. But she didn’t feel it, didn’t see it. Her mind was screaming in protest with the strain, her bruised ribs sent waves of pain through her, her entire body felt like she was back immediately after the explosion, as if the restful hours since then had never happened. She had known it would be too soon to come back, but there really had been no choice. There never was.

  Donovan was already beside her. He turned her to him and enveloped her in his arms. She was trembling with the strain and held on to him, fighting to stay standing.

  Scholes sat down on a seat be
hind them, stunned. “You’ve never done anything like this before,” he said, but knew better than to ask how.

  “You need to rest,” Donovan said softly.

  Lara shook her head and straightened up slowly. “I need to finish this.”

  He started to object, and her hand, on his waist, tightened a little, her eyes never leaving his. He nodded.

  She breathed in steadily, found what she needed within her. Stronger now, she turned her head and looked at Scholes. She didn’t notice that she didn’t move away from the man beside her, that he was still holding her. As she began to speak, her attention pulled away once again from the physical sensations, from the pain, the exhaustion, and back to where she needed it to be. Donovan felt the change in her, knew to move slightly away, knew to let her do what she needed to.

  Scholes watched, fascinated.

  Oblivious, Lara said, “He’s not running.”

  Both men focused.

  “He’s coming here.”

  Donovan took a step toward her again. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were distant now as the final pieces that had been organizing themselves in her mind fell into place one by one and the dynamics of it shifted again. “He is coming to IDSD.”

  Scholes called out to the operator, “Get Ericsson in here.” Then he turned back to Lara.

  “He has to,” she said. “He won’t try to get to the plane he chartered—he’s seen the forces we sent after him, he won’t underestimate our determination and our ability to find it. And he knows we know who he is.” They knew she had made the choice to tell Elijahn this when she baited him to keep him from going after his other targets again. “And running, hiding, won’t be easy. He’s not a ghost anymore. Everyone knows he’s alive.

  “There are other ways he could leave, return to his headquarters. But then what?” she continued. “He’s lost all the men he brought with him here, has three left at the most, most likely one. He’s been discovered, and he’s failed to destroy Oracle. A second failure, and after all his preparations. How do you think his people will react? Even the most loyal ones.