Flip

  “Keep tracking her,” he told Qian. “Let me know of any changes. Baka will be there shortly to take custody of her. If we can use the induced waves to keep her off balance, we can stop her from warning anyone. When can you induce waves again?”

  “Not for at least eight hours. We have to finish analyzing the data and allow time for the previously induced waves to dissipate. If new waves meet and join with the older ones, they would add to one another.”

  “Make it four hours. We have a tool. I want to use it.”

  ***

  It was still several hours before sunset in the Chama Valley. Greg, Natalia, and John were escorted into the main hall of the Buddhist temple and seated on low cushions that had been placed for them on the Saltillo tile floor. They sat around a six-foot-by-six-foot colorful geometric sand painting that occupied the center of the hall. The thick adobe walls kept the room surprisingly comfortable considering the cloudless New Mexico summer day outside. To one side, a small golden statue of the Buddha, adorned with garlands of fresh flowers, rested on a raised dais.

  Matthew came over to them. “I’m sorry for the delay. The mandala was finished just minutes ago. Your presence and participation are crucial to returning Dr. Doxiphus to this world. We will again mask her view of the Wave World,” he said, gesturing to the other monks, “while leaving her view of this world open.”

  “Where she’ll see us, right?” Nat was anxious to get started. “So she’ll see us and be drawn back.”

  Matthew nodded. “As we proceed, try not to pay attention to any negative thoughts or feelings that enter your mind. Keep your focus on your love for her. Visualize her waking up, and imagine your reunion.”

  “Of course,” Greg said.

  “Then let’s begin.” Matthew clapped his hands together once. A chime sounded somewhere in the shadows of the room and resonated with the monks’ deep-throated chant. Four monks carried Aida into the room on a pallet. The extra blankets were gone, replaced by a burgundy drape. A fifth monk carried the IV bag. They placed her over the mandala and hung the IV bag from a small camera tripod set up nearby.

  “This is a healing mandala,” Matthew explained. “My fellow monks started constructing it when I left for University City the day before yesterday. They placed each grain of sand by hand using a chak-pur, a small metal funnel. The mandala helps concentrate our energies.”

  Matthew stepped over to take his place by Aida’s head. He seated himself on a cushion, rested his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. “Start your visualizations now,” he instructed.

  ***

  Typically, a missing person report on a homeless vet never would garner the attention of the FBI. It would remain with the local police, in this case the Seattle Police Department. There it would sit at the bottom of a stack, along with thousands of other reports, cases, and incidents they were too understaffed to work on. It took FBI Special Agent Dan Kozlowski more than a moment of reading to understand why he was even looking at this file on Ray Lee Stevens.

  As it turned out, a woman claiming to be his daughter, one Jennifer Lynn Stevens of Sage Bend, Missouri, received a letter from the North Plains Life Insurance Company in Minneapolis telling her she had been named the beneficiary a ten-thousand-dollar policy, on the aforementioned Ray Lee Stevens. The letter indicated his residence as simply “Seattle, Washington.”

  Her mother had said her father had died before she was born. Jennifer never knew her father, so this news was an understandable shock to her.

  Boring

  Kozlowski read on.

  The same day, an anonymous tip came in naming Mr. Ray Lee Stevens. This time the report said he and a group of others, all homeless, were “being held against their will somewhere south of Seattle in the hills by the ocean.”

  Time to call Seattle PD and Washington State Patrol.

  ***

  Layer after layer of silver gray enveloped Aida, supported her, and gave her strength. Unhindered by exhaustion, she felt like herself again.

  “How are you?” Matthew asked from outside the cocoon.

  “Fresh, energized, sharp. Like I just woke up after a great night’s sleep. I didn’t realize I was so tired.”

  “Good. Let’s make use of that. You need to engage your senses, just like you do when you jump into someone else’s mind. Reach out. Feel yourself breathing. Your husband and daughter are just inches from you. They’ve been through a terrible ordeal, and they need you back. You can touch them; you can be home right now. All you have to do is reach.”

  In her inner experience, Aida placed herself in Greg’s arms and felt his touch. She held his hand, strong and warm. She stroked his unshaven cheek.

  “Reach, Aida. They’re right here waiting for you. Your daughter needs you. She’s been so brave these past few days, but she needs her mother to come back to her now.”

  “I’m trying!” If Aida could cry tears, she would have.

  My daughter and husband need me!

  “I can’t see them. Help me see them!”

  “You can see them. Just look out the front of the cocoon. Look away from the Wave World.”

  She reached out with the will people find deep in themselves when their life is threatened, committing her entire being to the attempt, giving everything she had. She would succeed or die. Out of the silver gray, sliding in from her left, she saw something she didn’t recognize. It was white with dark bands across it.

  “That’s it!” Matthew encouraged her. “You’re nearly there!”

  Elated, she realized that while she didn’t know what she was seeing, she did know it wasn’t the Wave World.

  ***

  “Aida!” Greg called.

  “Mom!” Natalia begged. Her mother’s eyelids fluttered, and her head turned toward Nat’s voice.

  ***

  Against the white background, Aida felt the back of her head shift against some cloth. There was Natalia’s face, streaked with tears and worn with fatigue.

  “Nat…”

  ***

  The strain on the dozens of monks was excruciating. Matthew had positioned himself toward the open end of the cocoon while their pearls clustered tightly around her, almost forming another outer layer of cocoon. They could keep this up only for a few more moments.

  “Matthew!” It was Max. “Something’s wrong! The cocoon is opening up.”

  “Where?” he said, trying to split his focus between Aida and Max.

  Alarmed, Max said, “At the other end!”

  ***

  A vision entered Aida’s mind and grew into a reality. She saw people on a tropical beach somewhere, hundreds of them. Most of them were standing, looking toward where the water should have been. A few dozen people, including curious children, were running out away from the beach onto the wet sand, where a few moments before they’d been playing and splashing in the surf.

  Behind Aida, inland, were streets, houses, hotels, and restaurants filled with people—thousands, tens of thousands. Locals, workers, and vacationers all going about another day in their life.

  Aida became aware of an event wave moving toward them all. Not as big as the ones that had battered her senseless before, but broader…much broader.

  Oh, my God. No!

  From this new reality came a certainty. Thousands of them were about to die unless they moved away from the beach now. A natural tsunami was coming. A disaster of unprecedented proportions, with monstrous cost in human life, was heading straight for them. In horror, she watched as they just stood there. All were curious; only a few sensed something was wrong.

  “Aida.”

  She heard Greg say her name and felt him touch her face.

  Everyone stood there, not believing anything would happen to them.

  Don’t make me choose. Oh, God, please don’t make me choose.

  The wave was still a little way off. There was still time to warn them, to rescue them.

  So she released her hold on Greg and Nat. The shimmering silver-gray
cloud fell away from her view. She tumbled and was pulled from every side. A moment later, she landed on the beach, looking out at the brown line on the horizon.

  “Run! Tidal wave! Tsunami!” she screamed. A few sunbathers turned toward her. “It’s a tsunami! Run!”

  Desperate to get them to move, she shouted and ran along the beach. Some local children heard her, and they took up the alarm. Still, the crowds remained transfixed, unmoving. The heat of the sun on Aida’s shoulders and head was almost painful, and the thick, humid air made it hard to breathe as she ran and screamed.

  The brown line had expanded as it drew closer. Those farthest out from the beach now saw it for what it was. Death. Relentless death in the form of a wall of water forty or fifty feet high, miles across and miles deep, rushed at them across the shallows. They started to run, but it was useless.

  Aida stopped running on the beach. She couldn’t look away, and she couldn’t help. “No!”

  The tsunami engulfed all of them and surged up the slight incline of the beach, not slowing at all.

  Before it hit her, she felt the rubber band tug.

  The event wave moved through pearls too numerous to count. Lights rolled, and some persisted after the event wave passed before they joined those that were snuffed out by the wave’s first touch.

  They’re all dying. I can’t save them.

  Never had Aida felt so powerless, so impotent.

  I couldn’t save them. Why didn’t they listen!

  An all-consuming feeling of frustration, fury, and despondency welled up within her, and she broke.

  “Damn it all!”

  She had no legs to run with, no fists to hit with, no lungs to heave out burning sobs with, no eyes to cry with or even to shut out the world with. All she had was the realization that she hadn’t been able to save these people.

  “Matthew…Matthew?” Her voice rang in the darkness, unanswered. She pulled her focus in to look around herself. The cocoon was gone. Greg’s face was gone. Pearls spun their webs around her, but no one was talking.

  “Nat? Greg?” she pleaded.

  Mental numbness greeted her when she reached out to them. Her focus wasn’t working the way it should; it wouldn’t latch on to them. She looked around.

  Pearls, decision threads, dark background, clusters, grouping, swirling clouds, distant spirals of light. All was just as it had been before.

  Something had changed in her, though. She felt it. An ugly, painful realization clawed at her, but she had so far refused to let it in to her conscious mind.

  No! No. No. No. No. No.

  It was there; it wouldn’t go away. Eventually she weakened, and in it came. The window back to Greg and Nat was gone. She couldn’t return. She had sacrificed her family in her attempt to save others, and she had failed at that too.

  No!

  24 New Mexicans at the Gate

  I n the warm evening sun, Mollie Garcia mudded up a crack in the one-hundred-year-old adobe wall near the front gate of the Chama Valley Zen Center. Adobe mud, the same color as her skin, was caked under her nails and in the deep creases of her calloused hands. She had done physical work like this for most of her sixty-five years and still looked young for it, her salt-and-pepper hair notwithstanding. While she worked, she hummed a tune her mother had sung to her when she was a child on the family ranch in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

  She didn’t turn right away to look when a big, shiny black SUV came up the gravel drive and parked on the other side of the vacant lot from her pickup truck. She did stop working when two imposing men in black suits stepped out. The big pale one with the close-cropped red hair started to come toward her. The other stayed back, standing behind the passenger door.

  “Hi. We’d like to go in and see the center. Can you open the gate and let us in?” he growled in a barely civilized voice.

  Leaning back on her knees, Mollie wiped her hands on her jeans and heaved a satisfied sigh as she admired her work and ignored the man. Pricked at being ignored, he took a few steps closer to her and drew himself up to his full height.

  “Look, lady. Maybe you didn’t hear me. But we’re going into that compound, and it’ll go a lot easier for you if you help us.”

  Mollie stood up to her full height, not quite five feet tall, and faced him. She squinted one eye at him. “To hell with you,” she said. “Go on and get yourself outta here.”

  He advanced on her, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  She didn’t move from where she stood except to hold out both hands and shout, “That’s close enough, pendejo!” when he was twenty feet out. The man didn’t break his stride, a malevolent grin stretched across his face.

  A subtle zinging sound parted the air, followed by a loud pop and hissing as the driver’s-side front tire of the SUV expelled its contents. Less than a second later, the sharp crack of the shot followed. The man froze in his tracks while the vehicle slumped to one side. His partner pulled out a handgun and drew down on Mollie.

  Another zing and the passenger side mirror exploded, raining plastic and glass shrapnel on the man. The message was punctuated by four more shots—two through the windshield, one into the passenger rear tire, and the last into a headlight just for good measure.

  “Las lomas tienen ojos, y rifles de caza tambien,” Mollie said, then translated: “The hills have eyes, hunting rifles too. Sounds like they’re loaded for big game. Lots of bears around here. You have to be careful.”

  The big man flinched as she took a step toward him and his partner, knowing he was standing in the middle of a kill zone.

  In the cold, rock-hard voice of the person in charge, Mollie said, “Now that we’re clear on things, you’d better drop that little toy pistola of yours before you get hurt.” The man’s partner dropped it as commanded. “Keep your hands out where we can see them. Go back in your truck, leave, and don’t come back. We’ll be watching.”

  Humiliated, the two men slowly worked their way back into what was left of their vehicle, started it, and backed out. Seething, the redheaded man glared at Mollie.

  She permitted herself a short chuckle as the SUV lurched, creaked, and hissed around the lot to exit the way it had come.

  “I’d like to see how they’re going to explain that at the car rental agency,” Mollie muttered.

  A few minutes later, as the sun set in the west, and its rich yellows, golds, and reds gradually gave way to pale and then the deeper blues of twilight, her two nephews, Miguel and Francisco, strolled into the lot, hunting rifles with scopes on their shoulders.

  She wiped her hands with a wet towel to get the mud off, then picked up her cell phone from a rock near her workspace and made a call.

  “You were right. Two big guys came by…no, no one got hurt. My nephews had to scare off some coyotes, that’s all…no, I don’t think they’ll be back,” she said, not believing the words as they came off her tongue, but she didn’t want to scare the monks.

  Mollie’s nephews loaded the rifles back into the rack in her pickup and pulled it inside the compound. “You boys better get ready, just in case they do show up again,” she called after them.

  ***

  “Thank you for making yourself available, Dr. Michelson. I understand you just flew in,” said the grant auditor as he proffered a polite handshake. “Herb Redwood, NIH.”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling back. “Happy to help. I did examine Aida—that is, Dr. Doxiphus. I have a passing familiarity with her work. Given the terrible situation, it’s the least I could do.”

  They were in Aida’s lab which had been sealed off after she was found unconscious. Kelley was speaking with the other auditor in Aida’s office, so Michelson was only able to catch portions of their conversation.

  “Well, no crime was committed, so there’s no reason to involve the police,” she overheard Kelley explaining.

  “Still, you have to admit that Dr. Doxiphus’s collapse, her lab tech’s sudden death, and her and her family’s disappearance from the
hospital could rouse more than a little suspicion,” the other auditor said.

  “They didn’t disappear—that was just a paperwork mix-up,” Kelley replied. “The Doxiphuses have every right to seek medical treatment wherever they choose, and they have my complete confidence. We’ve been completely transparent in this matter.”

  Kelley will be busy for a while, no doubt, she thought.

  “Dr. Michelson, Dr. Kelley was hoping you could help us with the QUESAM device,” Redwood said.

  Qian said this is how it would be.

  Redwood gestured for her to enter the stim room first and left the outer door open. “The console was locked,” he said. “Dr. Kelley was kind enough to have a technician come and open it. We found this screen still up. What can you make of it?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m more familiar with the generalities of Dr. Doxiphus’s work, not the actual software,” she lied as she seated herself at the QUESAM console, “but let’s take a look.”

  The grant proposal, its revisions, and quarterly reports Gilden had provided her contained more than enough information to decipher what she saw, and she knew the NIH had access to the same information. She was personally acquainted with all the leading experts in the field, but Redwood wasn’t one of them. Still, it always paid to be cautious.

  “They were working on developing a next generation cortical monitoring and stimulation system. You can see here in these windows the readings for the commonly monitored EEG wave rhythms.” She gestured to the screen. “Alpha, beta, theta, delta, mu, and lambda. Here’s some information from the last experimental run.”

  Michelson clicked on a multicolored image of Aida’s brain that was frozen in the center of the screen. Immediately below the image was a timeline bar.

  “I think we can replay the last run,” she said.

  When she clicked the “play” button in the lower left-hand corner of the window, the image jumped to the beginning of the run. Even though the 2-D rendering was crude compared to the imaging system Qian had developed, it sufficed. Waves of color played across the surface of the brain image, and by dragging on the image, Michelson was able to rotate it in a simulation of 3-D.