by Ben English
“Yes, sweetheart. He’s my friend.”
The little girl rested her head against her mother. “I bet you’ll see him again soon.”
“You’re probably right.”
The incessant tingling waves echoing through her lent a peculiarity to Mercedes’ thoughts as she watched Miklos and the other armed men. She didn’t know the names of their weapons, but that didn’t matter. She’d lost all fear of them. Moreover, details of each man were clear, sharp, almost sharper than they should have been, and Mercedes felt almost as if she stood behind a camera, waiting for the perfect moment to develop before her lens.
One of the guards walked with a limp, favoring a foot he’d probably stepped on wrong while lifting one of the crates of money. The other guard tilted his head whenever Miklos or his companion spoke to him. He was either deaf or hard of hearing in that ear. Miklos carried the same weapons as the other two, but his assault rifle had a longer ammunitions clip and a collapsible stock. A long hard line under his suit coat might have been a knife.
She tried to read their lips, but without luck. They spoke a language she did not understand. Still, there was something in their body language. His posture as they spoke to him was subtly different than before, and it came to her that Miklos was not really the top man. The two guards reported to someone else, someone . . . someone Miklos feared.
Mercedes wondered what she would do with this knowledge. All her senses felt pressed together, somehow. She needed to move.
Not yet. Not yet. Just breathe.
She probably would see Jack fairly soon. The crew of thugs didn’t strike her as the hostage-taking type. And whatever it was they’d injected them with—
—Except for the children. Why not inject them as well? Mercedes counted five, maybe six kids on board. Did Miklos or whoever was pulling the strings have something else in mind for the children?
Her ears popped.
The plane was banking, gently. Stealing a glance out the window, she saw a large moon slide by on the horizon. Mercedes shrugged, reached over, and flipped the window covering completely up.
The guard nearest her made a dangerous noise, but Miklos touched his arm, drawing him back into conversation. A few of the other passengers took note of this and opened their windows.
Pieces of the moonlight fell through soft gaps in the cloudrack to land in fixed patches of glittering silver on the water. The pattern of clouds and celestial light almost appeared orderly to Mercedes’ racing mind, and then the island slanted into view.
It was long, at least three miles, and actually sported a small range of mountains. The peaks hung in a wreath of fog or smoke, and looked craggy and uneven, volcanic. Forests were thick and dark, but broken occasionally by grassland that reminded her of savanna. Small clusters of electric lights pushed at the darkness. The plane bucked slightly in the thickening air.
A whine from below decks announced the landing gear being lowered. There wasn’t enough light outside for Mercedes to figure out compass directions, but they appeared to be coming down on a sheltered part of the island, underneath the shadow of the largest mountain. She had the impression of a large compound of modern-looking buildings just over the next rise, and then the wheels found the runway.
It felt modern, well-maintained compared to some of the airstrips she’d landed in her combat-photog days with Big John Holdaway. The tarmac went on and on, obviously long enough to support a full airliner. What was this place? The end of the runway abutted a beach, and as the plane taxied about she glimpsed a full construction crew, working under bright lights with modern equipment, laying a bulwark of sandbags and digging a diversion trench. Against the incoming storm, she supposed. There were two hangars near the opposite end. One looked military, almost like a Quonset hut. The other was larger and sported a full mast of antennae and satellite dishes. The windsock stood at full attention.
All these details leapt at Mercedes, and for a moment she doubted her ability to process them. But they roared in.
A guard took up station at the rear of the plane and Miklos addressed them, first in Spanish, then English. “Bring nothing. If you have medication, leave it. You will no longer require it. You will be walking nearly 2 kilometers. Prepare yourselves. Look only at the ground. If you look at something other than the ground, you will be shot. Anyone attempting to run will be shot, along with the person standing next to them. Stand up now.”
There was a spotlight just outside. It was blinding.
They filed off the plane and stood in a loose line, single file. More armed men—Mercedes couldn’t think of them as guards, these were soldiers, professionals—moved around them. They arranged them by nationality. The Americans and Europeans were nearest the tail of the plane, while everyone else was at the head—everyone Spanish-speaking, she realized.
This means something, said the voice. Close attention, now.
Miklos stood near her, with two of the men from the plane. They each looked uphill. Mercedes noticed this at the same time she saw Miklos’ lips move. He spoke sotto voce, nearly a whisper, but she caught enough of the sound and motion to comprehend.
“ . . . says he has enough for the experiment. Doesn’t want to waste food on them. Wait until after Raines passes by, then take care of it. The rain from tonight’s storm will scour the airstrip clean.”
Tears burst from her, unbidden, and she took a deep breath to shout a warning, to scream at Miklos, to curse everything she could see. Wind nudged her. The deep scent of the ocean reminded her of home, her first home in North Beach, a few blocks off San Francisco’s Embarcadero. That same scent. She hesitated. Waited long enough for the taste of the wind to change.
The posture of the guards changed slightly. A few casually checked their weapons.
It’s on me, came the thought, unbidden. Mercedes was struck with the idea that she could change the course of things, that the outcome of the next few seconds would pivot on what she—but that was foolish. What could she do? What had she ever done?
In Havana, she had run after Miklos, chased the plane. That was something.
And the simple fact remained that there was no one else. No cavalry. No Jack charging in to save her, like in a fairytale, like some kind of saving angel, like Christ at the gates of Hell.
The breeze chilled as it raced off the beach towards the mountain, and it carried a voice that pricked at her memory.
Three men walked toward her, along the line of the passengers. They looked to be coming from the building with all the sensors. One was a soldier, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a slightly older man in an impeccable white linen suit, whose face held a bemused expression. He didn’t quite look at anything, least of all the third man. He wore a lab coat, and was highly agitated.
“But sir, without telomeric cap protection, the genomes become unstable.” She decided his agitation was mostly due to nerves. He was afraid of the man in the linen suit. “The ends of the chromosomes are subject to DNA damage response—”
“—Which leads to cell cycle arrest, yes. We know this.” His voice was definitely familiar. It made her think of her parents, for some reason.
“But we still don’t know the cause.” His lab coat snapped upward in the wind. “The arrested cells are failing to recover.”
Mercedes’ head began to ache slightly. Not a sinus pain due to the climate, nor a grainy ache due to lack of sleep. She felt an oddness that suddenly seemed very familiar. Wonderful strangeness. Echoes of how she’d felt a few hours earlier, seeing Jack again for the first time. For the last time.
No, before that, even. In her parent’s library, at home. Watching them work. Listening to them debate theories, parry ideas across the huge desk they shared. There were papers on that desk. A sheaf of them was turned towards her.
The man in the white suite nodded pleasantly at Miklos even as he responded. “Focus on what we know. After a loss of telomere capping function, something at the level of the genome causes instability.”
&nbs
p; He passed her, looked at her body without looking at her, and continued, in a mutter. Mercedes became very aware of the guns held by the men standing in the wake of the white suit. It irritated her that she would be killed by a weapon for which she didn’t know the proper name.
The pressure on her head increased sharply, then lessened. It felt for all the world like someone set their palms softly on the top of her head.
Mercedes looked up at the receding shoulders of the man in the white suit. Light snapped off the fabric, but it did not blind her. Simultaneously, she saw the sheaf of papers on her parent’s desk. The title stood out to her, as did the words on the page. As clearly as if she bent over her parents’ desk, each of their voices in her ear.
“DNA repair attempts,” she said, and lifted her voice toward the white suit. “Tightly-regulated cellular DNA repair attempts cause genome instability.”
They stopped and turned. Miklos jaw dropped, and he looked at her as if the top of her head had suddenly exploded, expanded to fill the space under the wing of the airplane, and then rearranged itself in a much smaller volume back inside her skull. It certainly felt that way.
She continue, in a much more casual tone. “Chromosomes break down when telomeres are unprotected as DNA tries to repair itself. You need to maintain the telomere capping function.” Mercedes blinked, but the memory did not fade. She wasn’t imagining it. She knew she’d seen this, heard it. And so had the man in front of her.
The soldiers drew back as he approached, all but Miklos. The man in the white suit examined her carefully. Really looked at her. At length he said, “Hello, Mercedes. You have your mother’s and father’s mind.”
She found her own voice again. “Hello Aleks. Can’t imagine you working without Marduk. Is he poking around here somewhere?”
Provocateur
“Like driving a snowplow down a flight of stairs.” Alonzo’s voice through the helicopter’s speaker system sounded tinny and distant, but it kept Allison’s mind off the weather outside. Not that she could see anything past the blurred reflection of the aircraft’s lights and all the clouds pressing against them. The navigation and anti-collision beacons were the only proof they existed.
“Well? Major?” he asked. “Can’t wait to hear what you have to say about our lack of tactical planning. Weak operational doctrine, or—”
“It’s quite all right by me if you cease talking for a bit. Isn’t your mouth tired?” asked Allison. “Perhaps you’d prefer to concentrate on flying. I was beginning to wonder if you found it difficult to talk so much and fly simultaneously, given the weather.”
“Not really,” replied Alonzo. “Flying, by itself: not a problem. I can fly this thing blindfolded with a stopwatch and a calculator. It’s all equations for power and weight. Basic math.”
She detected no braggadocio in his tone. The man honestly believed he was that good.
“It’s all this extra . . . stuff.” His eyes strayed to a computer screen. “Tracking out a path through the storm, that’s the trick. Talking helps. Talking’s the only thing distracting me from how insane the rest of this is. Maneuvering through a tropical storm this size? Really isn’t supposed to be possible. If we get through this, I’m going to punch Jack right in the face.”
He smiled at her. “But we’ll be fine. I’m sure.”
The display between them showed a radar and satellite feed of the storm patterns ahead, areas of high and low pressure, probable wind currents, thermal layers, and areas of electrical discharge, in three dimensions. Four, if you counted time. Apparently there were pockets of calm in the tempest; relatively speaking. The opposite of microbursts. Allison still couldn’t quite believe he could make sense of the display, yet here they were, somehow still in the air.
She fancied seeing the crest of whitecaps below, and wrenched her attention back to the flying machine’s pilot.
Honestly, she decided, there could be something to him. It would take more than a decent flier to get them this far. His hands were light and quick on the controls. The Bell 430 helicopter zigzagged through the clouds, gingerly threading its way through the weakest spots in the hurricane.
After the next stuttering jolt of turbulence, Alonzo said, “Sorry we can’t get above it. This kind of helicopter only goes up to about fourteen thousand feet. We’re pushing her hard anyway, and as it is we’ve only got enough fuel for a one-way trip.”
“I don’t think the FBI will miss it,” said Ian. “And the State Department was just glad to get it off the roof of the embassy.”
“Aren’t we basically returning it to Raines?” asked Steve, and a few of them laughed.
Allison stole a glance at the cabin behind her. Ian held on for dear life, his fingers splayed and molded around the arm rests of his chair, while the two colossal Tanners appeared to be asleep, their feet propped up on the stacks of duffel bags and gear. Steve worked on his computer, focused on the screen. He had to brace it against his leg with one hand
“How can you bear to look at the screen in the midst of all this turbulence?” she asked.
“Got to finish up before we lose our internet connection,” he replied. “Raines’ companies run a bunch of web sites. Some are internal, just for employees. All together he’s got more than 150 websites and about 6000 web pages. Most everything he does is tied into a web application, and they never, ever go down.” He licked his lips. “For what we want to pull off, we need to keep his entire IT department busy.”
“So you’re going to run hacks against his sites?”
“Not just me. Got some buddies back in the real world going to help me out. I’m also setting up automatic programs, bots, that will launch other bots that will launch other bots that will attack. I’ll hit him with everything all at once. Denial of service attacks, cross-site scripting, navigational attacks, functional abuse, brute force attacks, sequel injection.”
She frowned. “Won’t Raines be able to see what we’re doing, or where we are attacking from?”
Alonzo didn’t take his eyes off the instruments. “Maybe I can explain it. Allison, picture an orchestra, with all the members spread out across the world in different countries. Sixty thousand musicians, all synchronized and ready to go. If each one of them plays a single note on their own instrument, at exactly the right time, you’ve got a symphony. Steve is like an orchestra conductor.”
Steve made a noncommittal sound. “The movies would call it a zombie attack.”
“Nothing like a good zombie uprising,” said Ian, through his teeth.
Allison supposed she understood. “And you are doing all this just so we can run the real attack.”
Steve nodded. “Straight from Hollywood.”
There was a pause in the conversation just then, and Allison realized it was the point just where Jack would have said something.
One of the Tannners snored, did not change position.
After a bit, Alonzo looked over at her. “Would you mind talking? Really, about anything. You have a good voice. It calms me down.”
She thought a moment. There had to be a topic that would occupy his mind without providing sufficient distraction to send the helicopter plunging. “The woman, Mercedes. She’s beautiful. What men would call a perfect ten.”
Alonzo allowed as that was nearly true. “I wouldn’t call her perfect.”
There was an odd tone to his voice. “For instance? What do you know about the perfect woman?”
“Well, she’s a southpaw. Left-handed.”
“You call that imperfection?”
“When we were kids, she and Jack used to juggle while holding hands. Damndest thing you ever saw. He was never coordinated enough to do that by himself.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, if I remember right, she had funny feet. Her toes.”
“What?”
“Her second toe is longer than her big toe.” He squinted. “Can’t believe I remember that.”
“That’s an imperfection?”
He shrugged.
“Her second toe? Which one is that?”
You know, next to her big toe.” Alonzo’s voice dropped a bit. “Wait. If the thumb isn’t really a finger, then is the big toe really a toe? And so the second toe isn’t really a second toe—”
“—No, I understand,” said Allison. “You mean her pointy toe.” She paused, stricken. “I can’t believe I just said that. I’m starting to sound like one of you people.”
Alonzo laughed. It was a surprising sound in the little cabin, and Allison was horrified to find she was tempted to join in. Nothing like a tiny snatch of humor in the face of certain death, she thought.
Steve spoke up from the rear. “Al, the storm is changing direction again. To beat it to the island we’re going to have to approach the beach from the southwestern side, otherwise you’ll be fighting the wind all the way in. Going to be rough anyway around the mountains.”
Alonzo's grin slipped toward a scowl, but he rallied. “What’s another 20 minutes in the air?”
Allison understood, however. She’d assisted him with the pre-flight prep, and doubted the fuel tanks held an additional twenty minutes of fuel. Keep the conversation going, old girl, she thought.
“What about the other one, Jack’s wife? Same kind of person?”
Ian spoke up. “Victoria and Mercedes? Wow. Where to start?”
“Black and white,” said Alonzo.
“Salt and pepper,” Ian added.
“Peanut butter and chocolate,” said Steve.
“Republicans and . . . whatever else there is,” concluded Alonzo. “Toria was a breed apart. A real original.” He laughed. “English was actually her third language. She was Irish, but grew up in Asia.”
“A really good cook,” said Steve. He’d finally looked up from his computer.
There was a story here, something interesting enough to draw their minds from the storm outside. Allison decided to bite. “She was a member of the team?”