She stared at it, her uncertainty quickly morphing into annoyance. This was so Alan to send her an encrypted USB. What was the point of sending her this stuff if she couldn’t access it?
When she flipped open the diary, two words in black marker were etched on the inside cover.
Play recorder.
She did as instructed. Soon, Alan’s radio-quality voice filled the room. Except he sounded awfully strange, speaking quickly, tripping over his words, as though he had a lot to say and no time to say it in.
“Mia, I need you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you. As soon as this recording is done, I want you to fill the sink in your bathroom and toss this recorder in.
“I know I’m the last person on earth you want to hear from, but there’s no one else I can turn to. The package you’re holding contains an explosive discovery that has put my life and the lives of those around me in danger. I don’t have time to go into detail, but here’s all you need to know. Salzburg syndrome is not what we thought it was. It was manufactured and not by us. The chromatid’s DNA holds the proof of what I’m saying, a secret message written by those who created it.
“Please keep the material safe until things here cool down. I’ll contact you in a few days. And Mia, above all else, trust no one.”
Mia swallowed hard, her heart hammering against the walls of her chest. All the moisture in her mouth was gone. What on earth was she to make of this? An encrypted USB and a story about some message hidden inside the DNA of a rare genetic disorder? She got up, steadying herself on a pair of wobbly legs. The digital recorder was still in her hand. She headed for the bathroom, intent on doing as Alan had suggested and dunking it under water. If he really was in danger, why would he involve her? Didn’t she already have enough on her plate to deal with? It was true that at the lab he’d often called her his protégée. Maybe he wasn’t sure who he could trust anymore.
Mia dumped the recorder in the sink and began filling it with water. It had reached the halfway mark when she heard a knock at her hotel room door.
A jolt of fear sent a rippling current coursing along every nerve ending. She skulked to the door, glancing through the peep hole. The man on the other side was wearing a hotel clerk’s uniform, but she didn’t recognize his face. After his second knock went unanswered, he scanned both ends of the hallway and produced an electronic room key, inserting it into the slot. Mia heard a click, followed by the sound of the handle being turned. He was trying to get in. But she had locked the bolt. That was when he swore and sent the heel of his boot thudding into the door. The water from the sink had begun to overflow, spilling onto the floor. Mia screamed, her feet slipping on the wet tiles as she recoiled.
But the scream only served to intensify her aggressor’s determination. The edges of the door began to splinter. With a burst of adrenaline, Mia threw herself forward and latched the swinging door bar, hoping that might stall him while she tried to escape. She ran toward the window, searching frantically for another exit. A sliding glass door by her bed led onto a small balcony. But her room was six stories up, far too great a height to leap off without snapping every bone in her legs—and maybe even her neck as well.
Mia snatched the backpack off her bed, searching for the pocket knife. The door flew open just as her frantic mind recalled she’d left it on the table. In a panicked blur of speed, she grabbed it and made a break for the balcony. At least there her yelling might alert the police.
The man came forward, bypassing the items from the envelope she’d left on the table. He stepped out onto the balcony. Mia held the knife out between them and let out a terrible shriek. For a moment, it had the desired effect since her assailant hesitated. Down below, a number of pedestrians stopped and craned their heads to see what was happening.
“Polícia, polícia,” she yelled, without any idea if she was even shouting words they understood.
“Put the knife down and come with me,” the man said calmly with a heavy accent. He lifted his shirt, revealing the gun in his waistband. “I don’t want to have to kill you.”
He continued to inch closer, one arm outstretched, the other hand on the hilt of the pistol. With every step, the real estate Mia was occupying on the balcony grew smaller and smaller.
“Get away from me!” she shouted and lashed out with the blade, slicing a deep gash along his forehead.
The skin split with surprising ease. A gout of blood poured down his face and into his eyes as both his hands went reflexively to the stinging wound.
“You bitch!” he yelped in agony and charged forward in a blind rage. At the last second, Mia dropped down and watched his arms close around empty space, his torso bending over the balcony railing from the momentum. For a moment, his legs lifted into the air and Mia grabbed and pushed upward with every last ounce of strength, watching his bulk counterbalance up and over the other side. He fell through the air in slow motion, his arms and legs wheeling wildly. He hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
Mia peered over the edge, her hands covering her mouth in horror. “Oh, my God, what have I done?”
Down below, a crowd gathered around the dead body. Some of them pointed in her direction. At her feet was the man’s pistol, which must have fallen loose as he went over.
Trust no one.
Scooping the gun up with two fingers, she darted back into the hotel room, grabbed her backpack and began stuffing it with whatever she could. In went the gun, a handful of other essentials, as well as Alan’s diary and the encrypted USB. She didn’t need to be a Nobel laureate to know the police might not believe her story. She had killed a seemingly unarmed man. Sure, he had kicked down the door, but she was a foreigner and he was one of them.
Trust no one.
She got to her splintered hotel room door and her British research assistant, Scott Chapman, appeared. The expression on his face changed the second he realized it was her.
“What happened?” he asked, utterly bewildered.
She blew past him.
“You have blood on your face,” Scott shouted after her. “If you’re hurt, let me help you.”
But she was gone. The adrenaline still coursing, she threw open the hotel stairway door and charged into an alley. A police car raced by, its sirens blaring. Mia had no clue where she would go, only that she was a fugitive in a foreign land. As she sprinted down the alley and onto a side street, Alan’s final warning kept buzzing through her head.
Chapter 13
There was only so much buffeting a man’s psyche could take before he decided he was better off battening down the hatches and diving for safer waters. That was how Jack was feeling after his conversation with Rear Admiral Stark. Much to his surprise, the Navy had known about the downed Cuban pilot in addition to their role in causing the strange gravitational anomaly. Stark had even handed over a few details of his own, namely that the anomaly had been the precursor to a burst of gamma rays and they had detected within said rays some kind of pattern. Stark had refused to elaborate any further, although he had made it clear the scientific personnel on the rig were being evacuated.
Jack had asked him for twenty minutes to speak with his crew in private. He needed to explain to a bunch of cranky scientists why their life’s work was being interrupted because of a military standoff in the Gulf. Stark had agreed to ten.
Everyone was assembled in the mess hall, the only enclosed room on the rig that could accommodate a group that size. Among them were scientists from an array of disciplines, plus their attending grad students, as well as the deckhands and support staff. In all they numbered fifty men and women and one synthetic person.
Jack stood before them and cleared his throat. The room was awash with rumors and rampant speculation. “I’m sure none of you need to be told what we found. The Navy has asked us to evacuate, but not because of that.” The room erupted in a cacophony. Jack put up his hand and called for silence. “They’re under the impression the disruption we experienced was a result o
f a science experiment gone wrong. Everyone in the area’s got an itchy trigger finger. And that burst of gamma rays didn’t help the situation. The scientific directive as outlined by the US Geological Survey and DiCore has also been put on hold. I’ll therefore be recommending that all non-essential personnel be relocated to the US mainland. That includes the drilling team, most of the deckhands and any scientists and grad students who wish to leave.”
“What about you?” Dag shouted from the back of the mess hall, near the serving line.
“I’m not going anywhere. I hope Rear Admiral Stark and his superiors will see the wisdom in what I intend to propose.”
Gabby rose to her feet, gripping Billy Brenner’s shoulder as she did so. “You wanna go into that thing, don’t you?”
Jack felt his hands pull out of his pockets and rest on his hips, a subconscious posture of guilt.
“We don’t know what’s down there, Jack,” Gabby snapped. “What if they decide to blow it up?”
Grant, seated nearby, broke into a gale of laughter. “Gabby, you and I both know they would never do such a thing. Imagine for a moment an ancient Greek scientist got his hands on a smartphone. Sure, he might never be able to figure out exactly how it worked, but that certainly wouldn’t stop him from taking the thing apart.”
Jack turned to Anna, whose android torso had been deposited on a seat next to Rajesh. She glanced up in thought. “A dispassionate search for the truth should always be a scientist’s prime objective. All other considerations are secondary. The question I have is why Dr. Bishop is so opposed to the idea.”
“Spoken like a true robot,” Gabby quipped, retaking her seat and crossing her arms without bothering to respond. As far as Jack was concerned, she didn’t need to. Gabby’s reaction made perfect sense. His co-chief was witnessing an expedition she’d spent years getting off the ground rapidly descend into a steep nosedive. The frustration on her face was clear to see—so too was the pain. But research often led scientists down alleys they never anticipated. Hell, if memory served him, Jack was pretty sure Viagra had originally been developed to lower blood pressure until doctors had noticed it was raising something else.
“There’s no denying it,” Billy said from the middle of the crowd. He was next to the other drilling engineers. “The government’s in a real pickle. I’m with Dr. Holland on this one. They sure as hell can’t blow it up and for the life of me I can’t see how they could scoop something the size of Lower Manhattan out of the hole it’s in.”
“That’s assuming we tell them it’s down there,” Jack said.
Gabby shook her head violently. He didn’t need an interpreter to know which way she was leaning.
The mood in the room appeared evenly split between those who were frightened and felt it should be left alone and those who were excited by the possibilities.
“Anyone who wants to leave has my blessing,” Jack told them. “Return to your bunks, gather your things and line up by the helipad. For everyone else, wait here.” Jack began moving through the crowd toward the mess hall doors.
“Boss, where are you going?” Dag asked.
“To tell Admiral Stark some of us are staying whether he likes it or not.”
Chapter 14
Needless to say, Jack wasn’t going to pitch it to the rear admiral in exactly the harsh terms he had indicated earlier. It was persuasion he was after, not a game of chicken with a guy who commanded an aircraft carrier strike group.
Seconds later, he found Stark and his men waiting by the rig’s busted drill. The rear admiral checked his watch.
“I gave you ten minutes,” he said without smiling. “That was fifteen. Means you owe me five.”
Jack made a mental note on the spot: Remind me never to invite this guy to a party.
“Your people are packing their gear, I assume?” Stark asked. “Once tensions in the area settle down, we’ll allow the heavy choppers back in to remove the shipping containers and anything else left behind.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Jack said, edging closer. “You remember those gamma rays you asked about? What if I told you we weren’t the ones who caused it?”
That final drop of good humor on Stark’s face melted away. “I’m not following you.”
“I’m saying we are sitting on the greatest single discovery in the history of the human race.”
Stark rolled back on his heels. “If I had a nickel every time one of you science types gave me that line, I’d be a rich man.”
“What if I told you we found a metallic structure five hundred meters beneath the ocean that would make a Nimitz-class carrier look like a tugboat?”
Stark paused and drew in a slow breath. “I would wonder what psychotropic substances you were on.”
“You were the one who showed up talking about rays from space and binary codes, Admiral, not me.”
“What kind of structure are we talking about?”
“That’s what we were trying to figure out when you and your men showed up.”
The glare in Stark’s eye grew sharp, dangerous. “You better not be trying to yank my chain, ’cause…”
“I can prove it to you,” Jack said. “But first, we need to discuss terms.”
“Terms?” The admiral spoke the words as though they were in a foreign tongue. A man like Stark didn’t negotiate. He took orders from his superiors and doled them out to those under him. Now Jack had the advantage.
“So far we’ve only seen it from the outside. There seems to be an opening of some sort, but getting inside may be a whole other kettle of fish. Some of the top scientific minds in the world are on this rig, just waiting to be unleashed. That’s what we bring to the table.”
“And what’s our role in this?” Stark asked, amused.
“The Navy’s deep-sea salvage units have the equipment we need to make it there and back in one piece.”
“I’m not buying what you’re selling, Jack.”
Jack shook his head, his eyes turned to the heavens. “Oh, what a cynical world we live in.”
He led Stark, Hart and Olsen to the ROV shipping container and the monitors they had used to oversee Zeus’ recent dive. Jack accessed the log and replayed the most recent entry.
Stark and the SEALs leaned forward, squinting at the monitor, their hands on the edge of the desk. Jack sped up the footage, rolling past the descent, slowing it down once they’d cleared the fissure. Each of the men maintained a neutral expression as the silver tip of the pyramid came into view. But they were only humans after all, humans who lived in a world that was well-defined and often infuriatingly mundane. The unpredictable chaos of battle was one way some folks learned who they really were. Facing the incredible was another. After they were done, the three men remained quiet, their arms crossed over their chests, their faces ashen. Even Hart’s flushed complexion had receded.
“Any second now, one of you is gonna ask me what the hell that thing is,” Jack predicted. “And the answer is we don’t know. What we can say with some certainty is that we didn’t build it and we didn’t put it there.”
“By we you mean Americans?” Lieutenant Olsen asked, staring intently.
“By we, I mean humans.”
Admiral Stark brought the back of his hand across his forehead, slick with sweat. “You know if this is real then we can’t possibly honor any agreement.”
“You can,” Jack insisted, “and you will, because copies of all the data we’ve collected so far—seismic, GPS, video—have already been encrypted and sent to a safe place. I only need to say the word and all of it gets sent to every major news organization around the world. If I don’t check in with a password within seventy-two hours, the same thing happens. And try not to forget, gentlemen, we’re in Mexican waters right now. I’m sure if anyone has a rightful claim to this giant tin can, it’s them. And you can bet your bottom dollar the Cubans and the Russians would put up one hell of a fight to get their hands on whatever’s inside. So we can work toge
ther and get to the truth or you can watch this pissing contest in the Gulf spiral into a real war.”
“Where did you find the time to send copies of the encrypted data off for safekeeping?”
Jack twisted the knife. “I used those extra five minutes you gave me.”
Chapter 15
Mia’s boots shuffled along a wide dirt road. On either side of her were rows of two-story homes with red-tiled roofs. The sun had set less than an hour ago, and a silence had descended over the street, broken only by the distant sound of a barking dog and the cell phone that kept ringing in her pocket.
Since fleeing from the hotel, she had slunk through back streets, attempting to evade both the people who wanted her dead and the police who wanted her for murder. When her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again, she checked it, having learned from her earlier mistake. The number flashing was one she didn’t recognize. She let it go to voicemail.
She was still dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing during the attack, her cargo pants and dark button-down shirt. On her feet were a pair of hiking boots and slung over her back was a knapsack filled with two extra shirts, underwear, socks as well as the journal and encrypted USB Alan had sent her. But not the voice recorder. That was back at the hotel resting in a sink filled with water.
Sweat from the evening heat beaded on her forehead and ran down her back. Mia wondered now whether destroying the recorder had been the right decision. The cops only had to listen to what was recorded to know she was telling the truth.
She kept playing the scene over in her traumatized mind. How her attacker had kicked in the door and lunged at her on the balcony. Mia let her hand fall to the assassin’s pistol, now resting in her waistband. Why hadn’t he shot her? He had even said he didn’t want to hurt her. A killer with a heart of gold? Or maybe Alan’s research wasn’t the only thing he’d come to retrieve. The memory of his body hitting the ground ricocheted inside her head.
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