Encrypted: An Action-Packed Techno-Thriller

by Carolyn McCray

  “No!” Quirk announced—far too loudly, given the situation. In a manner far quieter than his “oh, snap” persona, Quirk continued, “No, I’ve got it.”

  Her normally exercise-averse assistant reverently lifted the Elvis painting from the wall and hugged it to his body. “This way.”

  Quirk headed down the hallway, away from the front door. Zach raised an eyebrow. This wasn’t the plan. However, Quirk was right. They couldn’t go out the front. They were going to have to make for the back of the property and meet up with the SUV on the other side of the fence.

  They followed Quirk down the hallway and past the stairs where he dodged to the left, opening a door as if he had lived here his whole life. They passed through a small hallway and then headed left.

  Where they all stumbled to a stop.

  “Quirk…” Ronnie threatened.

  Thick, green shag carpet stretched out before them, ending at the edge of a pool fed by a waterfall cascading down a faux stone wall. Ferns hung from the rafters, and even the ceiling was lined in green shag.

  So this was the infamous jungle room.

  When Quirk didn’t answer, apparently so enthralled with the carved wooden furniture and strangely, a teddy bear in the far corner, Ronnie elbowed him.

  “Quirk!”

  The young man had to shake his head several times before being able to focus on her annoyance.

  “What the hell are we doing here?” she pressed.

  “Um,” Quirk said, regaining his composure. “We needed to get to the back of the house. We are at the back of the house.”

  Several sets of squealing tires announced the arrival of the main security service.

  “We must burn it. Now,” Francois said. “If we are to be captured, we must all know the symbol, quadrupling our chances of spreading our knowledge.”

  For an old guy who spent half his time mumbling in Latin, he did have a point. Guess he had been at this hidden angelic script thing the longest.

  Ronnie nodded to Zach, but Quirk stepped between them. “Please. Let me.”

  Normally, Ronnie would have shut her assistant down. However, she heard something in his tone. Not pleading or desperate, not how Francois had been, but reverential. Even Zach must have sensed the change, because he simply handed over the can of Aqua Net and the lighter.

  Ronnie whipped out her phone, hitting the video record button. Who knew what Elvis was going to reveal?

  * * *

  Quirk gently leaned the painting up against the jungle pool. Elvis must have known it would come to this. Or at the least, his father Vernon, who gave him the painting. They meant for Elvis to be a part of this angelic legacy.

  Picasso had already burnt, but you know, it was Picasso. Who but a bunch of chai- loving intelligentsia would care? But Elvis?

  Quirk had to be strong, though. For the King, and for the world.

  He struck up the lighter. He squeezed the spray nozzle. Fire shot out in front of him. As the flame licked the saintly image, he began to hum, and then sing, “Love Me Tender.”

  The canvas caught fire, crackling before them. Only Elvis’ visage didn’t melt or distort. He stayed ever the King as the fire consumed the painting.

  To Quirk’s surprise, another voice took up the song at “Take me to your heart…”

  He turned to find Zach’s tenor added to the melody. Soon, Francois and even Ronnie were singing along as the last of the painting flared before the symbol sparked to life. Only this time, it wasn’t just a single angelic script in the center. A host of musical notes surrounded the symbol.

  So fitting for the King.

  Then it was all gone. Vanishing with a final spark that floated down, extinguished only when it hit the pool of water.

  A car screeching to a halt just outside the window shattered the eloquent moment.

  Was Quirk surprised that their pilot drove the SUV? Not in the least.

  “Need a ride?” he shouted.

  Zach nodded as he picked up a chair to break the elaborate leaded-glass window.

  “Guess he really does know you,” Ronnie admitted as the pane shattered.

  Yes, Quirk thought, yes, the pilot did.

  * * *

  Ronnie caught hold of her laptop as the SUV bounced over the back acreage of Graceland, and then smashed through a wooden fence. They raced onto other property, angling toward a side street exit from the neighborhood.

  At this point, she trusted the pilot to get them out of here. Her focus had to be on this latest symbol. She had seen it before. Or at least the three angelic script runes that made up this altered symbol. Rapidly, she scrolled through her burgeoning inventory of angelic script.

  There the three symbols were. Each was the head of a major line of script. Ronnie followed a hunch and took those three lines and overlapped them. Nothing--just garbage. The sequence made no sense. Even with the information Francois had contributed on how to decipher the mess, this newest symbol still made no sense.

  Finally, the tires hit asphalt, and they fishtailed onto a two-lane road. Ronnie’s elbow knocked into Zach’s side. Flinching he angled his body away from her.

  “So sorry,” she mumbled feeling like all she had in her for Zach were apologies.

  “It’s okay,” he said, but his clenched jaw said otherwise. “Find anything?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  Ronnie tried to concentrate on the screen but that would be a heck of a lot easier if Zach weren’t sitting right next to her. Things had been simpler when he was in the front seat. However, when they were all piling into the car after the jungle room, no one had challenged Quirk’s claim to the passenger’s seat.

  Now she was either worried about accidently ramming some part of her body into his black and blue rib cage, or missing him being closer, with their body heat mingling.

  Ugh. See? It was thoughts like that kept her from solving the puzzle.

  And quite a puzzle it was. This latest set of symbols definitely wasn’t fitting into her very limited view of angelic script. She looked to Francois, but his eyes were already closed, despite the sharp right and left turns the SUV was making.

  “Junk DNA,” a voice from the front seat said. Quirk poked his head between the seats, showing her his screen. Of course, he had hacked into her feed, reading her work. “Doesn’t it look like junk DNA?”

  In too much of a hurry to care about Quirk’s lack of boundaries and scold him for it, Ronnie studied the garbled text with a new eye. Could her assistant be right? Was this sequence intentionally left undecipherable?

  Zach shifted next to her, reading over her shoulder. “I thought DNA was pretty damned important?”

  “It is,” she answered as she brought up an image of the double helix. “Only scientists have found large chunks of it that didn’t make any sense. It is considered ‘non-coding’ DNA, since didn’t make any proteins.”

  Quirk chimed in, “Hence the ‘junk’ part.”

  “Only now, they don’t believe it is ‘junk’ at all,” Ronnie said as she searched the definition of the term. There it was. “Many believe that it has a translational role.”

  Translation: Yes. That pile of “junk” script was really a placeholder. It told her that something needed to go there. And she knew just the something. Rapidly, Ronnie brought up a sequence she had built back in Mexico. While she couldn’t break the entire set of symbols, there were a few that at least made a little sense. She plugged this set into the gap of the “junk” script?

  As her mind sought to decipher this new line, Ronnie sensed people talking around her. She could feel Zach move toward and away from her, but her mind whirled with possibilities. Her fingers tapped at the keyboard, dragging this symbol into place, and then rejecting it for another, and then bringing it back, only to reverse the order.

  The gilded symbols became like water, malleable and fluid under her touch. They swam across her screen, diving and gliding into place. They pulsed in beat with Elvis’ tune, seeming to want to
assemble themselves in the right position.

  Then, there it was. A list. An indisputable list glistened back at her.

  She looked at Zach, or where Zach should be. She looked on the other side. No Francois. Both driver and passenger seats were empty.

  What the…?

  “Hey!” Quirk called out. “I think she’s rejoined us mere humans.”

  Ronnie blinked, trying to make sense of Quirk’s words as Zach leaned back into the car.

  “Hey there, sexy.”

  His playful tone drained her anxiety. “Hey there, yourself.” She looked out the door to find they were at a small airstrip. “How long was I out?”

  Zach looked at his watch. “A little over an hour and fifteen minutes. The pilot’s got the plane ready. We just need a destination.”

  She frowned. While she had cracked a large part of the code, it had only given her an extensive list of painters’ names. No locations. Just names.

  “Monet, Renoir,” Quirk read from his screen. “And Charles Schulz?”

  Yes, strangely, the Peanuts creator was on the angels’ list, but after the Elvis painting, nothing would really surprise her. Quirk went on reciting a veritable Who’s Who of famous painters. Which was great, but that didn’t exactly give the pilot a direction to head in, or a new destination.

  “Well, over 70 percent of these artists are represented at the Met,” Quirk turned his computer screen, showing them the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “I mean, it’s not 100 percent, but…”

  Ronnie turned to Zach. “I don’t think we can expect 100 percent assurance for any of this. But based on the amount of ‘junk’ code I’ve got, we are going to have to find a whole lot of paintings very quickly.”

  “Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art it is.”

  “Of course,” Francois stated matter-of-factly, walking past them toward the plane. “Isn’t that where you thought we were heading?”

  Seriously?

  After all that time, effort, and code breaking?

  Ronnie glared at the old man’s back as he made his way to the twin-engine plane, never wanting to throttle one of her elders so badly in her life. Zach squeezed her shoulder, somehow diluting her anger.

  “If Francois knew it all, he wouldn’t need us, right?”

  Damn right, Ronnie thought as they headed to the plane. She felt like shaking the old man back to his senses until she saw the drops of blood following behind him, like an injured puppy dog.

  Ronnie sighed. Francois was giving as much as he could. After carrying this burden for so long, it was pretty surprising that he could give anything at all.

  * * *

  “There has been a break in at Graceland,” an acolyte announced as he rushed into the room.

  Very slowly, rising from his meditation, Lino opened his eyes to receive the agitated messenger.

  “A man fitting Brother Loboum’s description set afire a portrait.”

  Of course, Francois had. The man was cagey and sloppy all at once. He was privy to some of the Hidden Hand’s most sacred truths, yet still could not find his way through a straight-lined maze. For every painting that Francois torched, he lit a beacon in the night for Lino to follow.

  And the Presley painting…

  Vernon, Vernon, Vernon. Such a dark chapter in the Hand’s history. Their core had wavered. Disheartened by modern medicine’s ability to prevent or cure the cleansing scourge, they had sought to infiltrate modern culture. Curry favor amongst the elite. What had that Presley boy done besides learn how to oscillate his iliosacral junction?

  Those responsible for such a lowering of the Hand’s sights were feeble, weak, and ultimately ineffectual. Ones even as easy to manipulate as Vernon had turned on the Hand. Betraying the order and their purpose. Shortly after, there had been a cleansing purge within the Hand.

  A purge that rid them of any not strong enough to conceive and execute a worldwide plague of biblical proportions. Lino had been born to this task, and he would not falter.

  Brother Loboum would find more than paintings burning at his next destination.

  Francois had tipped his hand greatly.

  Lino turned to the messenger. “Have the jet prepared. We go back to New York.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Plum Island

  4:16 a.m., EST

  Amanda jerked upright, blinking, keeping herself from falling asleep. The data was finally starting to make sense. She had identified over ten thousand possible loci. Now the only job left was to hone that down to a Hidden Hand safe house on the Eastern Seaboard.

  Yeah, no matter how you sliced it, nothing about it qualified as “only.”

  A noise near the door attracted her attention. Although a part of her didn’t want to expend the energy to even turn her head, she did—but wished she hadn’t. Not with Henderson and Devlin dragging a co-worker out.

  The director caught her gaze. “We’ve taken all the food out of the refrigerator units…”

  She sighed. He didn’t have to tell her what they were using the industrial-sized refrigerators for. Clearly, the death count had risen to a point where they now needed to be concerned about contamination from the corpses. Normally, Black Death victims were burned, but with the rainy weather outside, there would be no pyres.

  “How many?” Amanda felt she needed to ask.

  Henderson glanced around the room. Half the scientists remained, and most of them listed on their seats looking not long for this world. As the director and Devlin continued their grim task, Amanda glanced at Jennifer.

  Her assistant lay over the desk, resting her head on her crossed arms. She was just resting, right? Amanda watched her assistant’s chest. It was rising and falling, right? She put her hand near Jennifer’s nose, but couldn’t feel any breath.

  Amanda snatched her hand away. Her assistant was barely recognizable—with her puffy face from lack of lymph drainage to her skin—mottled with oozing boils. Then, those dark blue lips.

  Carefully, she reached out and shook her assistant’s shoulder. “Jennifer?”

  No response. Amanda refused to believe that her best friend was dead.

  “Jennifer?” She shook harder.

  Then, with a raspy cough, her assistant opened her bloodshot eyes and gave a weak grin. Amanda nearly burst into tears. Instead, she put on a brave face and smiled back, rubbing Jennifer’s back. The woman tried to sit up, but Amanda urged her to lie down.

  “Get some rest.”

  Jennifer’s forefinger and thumb made the sign for “little.”

  “Yes, Jen, just a little more rest.”

  As her friend let gravity close her eyelids, Amanda let the tears flow. She might as well cry while she still could.

  * * *

  Zach watched through the plane window as terrain streaked by, but not nearly fast enough. The pilot had to keep them under the radar, and therefore couldn’t gain the altitude needed to really increase speed. What should have been a five-hour flight was now a grueling six-hour plus roller-coaster ride. To stay out of any major airport or military base’s flight zone, they had to zigzag their way up the Eastern Seaboard.

  He had to give credit to the pilot. By faking a blown transponder and sketchy radio, the guy had threaded this difficult needle all the way to New York. But the way the pilot kept glancing down at the fuel gauge, Zach had a feeling they were going to make it into the Essex County Regional Airport on fumes.

  Even if they had to make an emergency landing, Zach could never blame the guy. If it hadn’t been for the pilot, they’d probably still be in Mexico under the Federales’ custody, or worse, turned back over to the CIA.

  Zach glanced at Quirk, who slept with his mouth open just slightly. Between checks of the fuel gauge, the pilot would glance at Quirk. Who knew how much of the pilot’s cooperation was due to financial gain, and how much because of this somewhat odd attraction? They said opposites attracted, but this was a pretty extreme case. Seriously, who knew how the heart worked?

&nbs
p; Zach turned his attention to Ronnie, who was hunched over her computer as Francois leaned on her shoulder, snoring blissfully away. By the way Ronnie fidgeted in her seat and bit her lip, she wasn’t in “the zone.” He’d already learned that if she were, she wouldn’t move a muscle, except for those in her fingers as they flew over the keyboard. Zach wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not that she was only using her normal brain RAM speed.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art boasted some of the most sophisticated antitheft systems in the world. To think that Ronnie could stage a break-in, orchestrated in under eight hours, seemed ludicrous. But ludicrous was the norm these past twenty-four hours.

  Every joint ached from the abuse of the last day, but whatever mixture of meds Quirk kept coming up with certainly took the edge off. At some point, though, the injuries were going to catch up with him. And when they did? He wanted a morphine drip, please.

  “TXM918, we are still not picking up your transponder,” air traffic control stated in Zach’s headset.

  The pilot rubbed the radio handpiece on his jeans, crackling the connection. “Be advised, Essex, that we are low on fuel and coming in with minimal altitude.”

  “TXM918, be advised that you cannot land here. We are inside the red zone. Please divert to Logan Airport.”

  “Tell that to my fuel gauge,” the pilot said, and then snapped off the radio.

  The red zone. As they had flown through the night, they’d heard snippets of local radio stations announcing at first mass evacuations, and then orders of quarantine. They had traveled from the green zone of Tennessee to the yellow zone of Charleston to the orange zone of Washington D.C. and now the red zone of New York. They truly were flying into the thick of the storm.

  All to burn a bunch of paintings, hoping that it led them to the organization that had started all of this. To find a supposed vaccine. There were way too many “hopes” and “supposes” in that equation for Zach. He preferred a little door-breaking and hot-car pursuit. The closest they were coming to his FBI wheelhouse was to steal a car, stay under the speed limit and make their way into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.