Her face lit up in a way that always made Eugene’s heart do funny things in his chest. He hated to admit even to himself how it disturbed him to see that light shine on another man. He bit down hard on his personal angst and said nothing.
“Of course you may,” Mini said and moved to show Lorstad her studio.
Chuck raised a hand to stop them, though. “Kristian, wait. Are you responsible for cutting us off from the Internet? Was that intentional?”
“Charles, I assure you, it is best that you do not let the outside world in. No good can come of it. Believe me, we are adequately shielded from any attempt the Alphas might make to get to you here.”
“That is not my concern, Kristian. My concern is for the people who may be caught in the path of whatever destruction they mete out. There were tourists, news crews, workmen, and law enforcement officers in the National Mall when that”—he made an emphatic gesture at Eugene’s computer—“happened.”
Lorstad tilted his head, a slight frown knitting his brow. “And if you are aware of everything the Alphas are doing? What then? Do you have the capacity, now, to do anything about it? Are you actually prepared to confront them?”
Chuck reacted as if Lorstad had punched him in the gut. He flinched visibly and took a step back. “No,” he said, his voice muted. “No, we don’t. We’re not.”
“Neither are we,” Lorstad told him soberly. “Which is one reason I wish to begin my own education as soon as possible. I’ve also identified others whom I would like to begin the Zeta program.”
Chuck merely nodded. Lorstad escorted Mini to her studio at the far end of the room, glancing back over his shoulder with a puzzled expression. Eugene was the one who was puzzled, though. What is with the guy, anyway? Does he really not understand our resistance to being cut off from the world? Blind and deaf to what the Alphas are doing?
“He doesn’t get it,” Chuck said softly. “He either doesn’t understand what they can do or simply doesn’t care. I can’t decide which is worse.” The Center was beginning to slowly tighten the noose in a very Deep Shield manner. No—he couldn’t believe that; these were scientists after all, not soldiers. He prayed he was right.
“Doomsday cult,” said Lanfen.
Everyone turned to look at her.
She shrugged. “Look at them—self-contained little universe, the glorious goal of human evolution on the horizon. At least that makes them different from Howard and his band. But they may be resigned to the idea that some old stuff has to be destroyed in order to make way for the new stuff. They may even welcome the idea.”
“We talking about Sara and the boys or our hospitable hosts?” Euge quipped.
“Welcoming a new, better world doesn’t require being callous about a potential loss of life in the old one,” said Chuck grimly.
“There wasn’t any loss of life in Washington,” Euge was quick to point out.
“This time,” said Chuck. “There was no loss of life this time.” He glanced around at the others and took a deep breath. “Back to work, everybody. Lorstad is right about one thing: if we aren’t ready, willing, and able to do anything about the Alphas, we can’t waste time obsessing about what they’re up to. We need to make ourselves ready.”
Everyone went back to what they’d been doing except for Eugene. He was watching the pair at the far end of the room, backlit by the magnificent “wall of light” the Benefactors had constructed to shine on Mini’s studio space. Lorstad was manifestly more interested in Mini than he was in Lanfen or even Chuck. The question was, of course, Why?
Matt strode into Leighton Howard’s office at the Forward Kinetics campus and thrust his iPad at him. “This was the Alphas, wasn’t it?”
Howard didn’t even look at the video frozen on a frame that showed the top of the Washington Monument bowing toward the Lincoln Memorial like a priest at an altar, wrapped in a cloak of smoke and debris. “What do you think?”
“The newsfeeds are saying it was Al Sabbah. That Al Sabbah took responsibility for it.”
“I have no control over what Al Sabbah decides it wants to take credit for.”
“I suppose you think that buys you some time? It won’t. Not with Sara. You cannot stonewall her. She will just do something bigger and badder. Go to the president now, for God’s sake. This is the golden opportunity to get her to believe you. Take me with you. I’ll sell her on the truth—”
“You are dismissed, Dr. Streegman.”
Bullshit.
And then it dawned on him that he didn’t need to just think it.
“Bullshit. You can’t dismiss me. I’m not one of your grunts. You cannot hope to stay dark any longer.”
Howard looked up at Matt over the lid of his laptop. “You have no idea what I can or cannot hope, Doctor. I gave Ms. Crowell and her associates one of the items they asked for. I gave them the whereabouts of Mr. Yenotov’s family and pulled my assets back. They’re now in touch. That will buy us time.”
“Time to do what?”
“I really can’t discuss that with you, Streegman.”
Matt muzzled his desire to throw his iPad at the man’s head and left the office. God, but this was a wretched situation. He had no way to contact Chuck—no idea where in the world Chuck was. No way to contact the government without being discovered. He was like a rat in a maze of dead-end corridors.
Maybe, he thought, I should try to find a way to reach Sara.
Howard was in contact with her on a fairly regular basis. Maybe there was a way he could piggyback some sort of message on the general’s signal without being caught. The Alphas might be monitoring the outside world in ways he possibly couldn’t imagine. Clearly, they had appropriated television signals. If he was going to reach them, he had to think outside the norm. With that in mind, he retired to his own office to think and plan. He knew he was being monitored, so he took the precaution of making notes in a small three-ring notebook that never left his pocket. The notes were in a code he’d developed in college so he could make observations without other students being able to read them. Only two people knew that code—he and Lucy. He’d shown it to her when they were both seniors at MIT. They’d used it to write love notes to each other.
When she’d lain dying in the hospital, destroyed by a neurological disorder that was as much a mystery today as when she’d contracted it, she’d tried to communicate with him using that code. Only then, he hadn’t known it; Chuck had ferreted it out. He wished for the thousandth time that his wife had lived long enough for Chuck Brenton and his brain wave theories to come into the picture, then realized—also for the thousandth time—that were it not for Lucy’s death, he never would have gone into partnership with Chuck or founded Forward Kinetics in the first place. There would have been no Brewster-Brenton Brain Pattern Monitor, no Brenton-Kobayashi Kinetic Interface, no Streegman Kinetic Converter, no conversion algorithm . . . and no Zetas.
“Do you speak German?” Lorstad asked as they walked the corridor of the secret lowest level.
Mini started to wrinkle her nose, then caught herself. Since forging a relationship with Eugene and taking on a full-time job with Forward Kinetics, she had become hyperaware of those little personal habits of expression, dress, and speech that made her brothers and father ruffle her hair and tease. Were she alone with Euge, wrinkling her nose might elicit a smile or a kiss; in context with a professional team of scientists or with this very proper, vaguely European gentleman, it just made her feel like a child in the company of an adult.
There were two things she had never realized before she fell in with Chuck Brenton’s crew of misfits. One was exactly how much her father’s and brothers’ views of her had molded (or maybe warped) her self-image. The other was how good it felt to fit in somewhere without being like any of the people around her.
This brought her to another jarring realization: she hadn’t thought about “fitting in” for some time. She found herself studying Kristian Lorstad and wondering what it was about him that m
ade her suddenly self-conscious. A second later, as she met his gaze, she knew the answer: he was studying her.
“German?” she repeated. “No. I speak French fairly fluently, though. I did a term abroad in Lyons. But my attempts to learn German were failures. Too many pronouns.”
He tilted his head in that characteristic way that reminded her of the family cat, and she felt the weight of his regard. Should she not have made light of the German language? But he only smiled and said, “Just so. I asked because of the painting you showed me—the fairy Valkyrie. She reminded me a bit of you.”
Mini laughed. “You’re the first person to make that connection. She is sort of me. The way I see myself on the inside . . . I guess. Soft and tough. Gentle and strong.”
“In armor made of crystal.”
“I can’t see myself in metal armor.”
“Neither can I.”
Lorstad stopped before the immersion room he had shown them before. The door opened automatically to admit them. Music began to play softly from unseen speakers. Mini knew it well.
“The Magic Flute!” she said. “I love this opera.”
“As do I. The computer plays it because it is also my favorite and is what I choose to surround myself with when I immerse. The ‘Queen of the Night’ is my favorite of the arias. ‘Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,’” he said softly, then translated, “‘The vengeance of hell boils in my heart.’”
“Is that what that means? I knew it had something to do with hell. Violence and vengeance wrapped in beauty . . . It’s like them, isn’t it? Like Sara, Mike, and Tim with their zeta powers. The powers themselves are a thing of beauty, but instead of using them to create beauty, they use them to pursue vengeance.”
“Which you cannot understand,” suggested Lorstad.
“Oh, no. I understand it. I just reject it.”
He seemed surprised, looking at her in a way that made her feel like a specimen under a microscope. “‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’?”
“Even God doesn’t mete out vengeance,” she said. “He metes out justice. There’s a difference. But, honestly, I don’t think we human beings are quite capable of justice ourselves. We only imagine that we are.”
“That is certainly true, Minerva. And it is why the Benefactors exist. With your help—with Charles’s help—we will create a new humanity that is capable of justice.”
“I hope you’re right.” In an effort to escape Lorstad’s disconcerting gaze, Mini moved to peer into the immersion tank nearest her. To her relief it was empty. “It feels . . . strange to think of being so in charge of our own evolution, but I guess we have been for a long time. We just haven’t done a very good job of it. Too lazy. Too selfish. Too unaware of our own reality.”
“You are a very perceptive young woman, Minerva.” He moved to stand next to her. “One inclined to deep thought. Perhaps you might consider an immersion session yourself? I think you would find it deepens the effects of meditation exponentially.”
Mini considered it—for an instant—and then rejected it. The very thought of being in that tank filled her with dread. She shivered and stepped back from the machine, shaking her head. “No. I couldn’t.”
He was studying her that way, again—she could feel it, though she wasn’t looking at him.
“There is nothing to fear.”
“Yes, there is. Remoteness. Being cut off from . . . everything. Everyone.” She glanced sidewise at him and saw that he was smiling at her indulgently.
“I have always found that one of the richest pleasures,” he said. “To be alone with the music in my head, weightless, disembodied, unique.”
I am not you, she thought, but did not say it aloud.
He guided her through the immersion process anyway, describing in some detail the various stages of it, the exhilaration he felt during the out-of-body “walks” he had learned to take. She recognized his intent: even though she had told him she didn’t want to undergo immersion, he was trying to sell it to her. She felt a tingle of irritation at the spin exercise, because it reminded her so much of other situations she’d been in, in which someone was trying to convince her that she didn’t know what was best for her or what she wanted. The counselor who’d tried to steer her into commercial art (because surely she wanted to make good money); the guy who’d tried to get her into bed with him by mansplaining that she just didn’t get that pairing love with sex was hopelessly anachronistic (he’d actually used that word, too)—when that didn’t work, he’d told her he loved her. His final bid was a failed attempt to ply her with booze.
What would Lorstad tell her, she wondered, to try to get her into that tank?
Margaret Ellis knew she should eat the sandwich that the Secret Service operative had just set on the table between her and her chief of staff. She could feel her blood sugar ebbing but her stomach was tied in knots. The Al Sabbah video was legit, to all appearances. The thought of a terrorist organization being able to stab at the heart of American identity in the cradle of its administration made Margaret sick.
Most troubling was the fact that no one had seen anything. There had been no suspicious activity near the monument. None. None of the agencies involved in the massive manhunt had discovered anything after the fact, nor had they seen anything leading up to it—not even cell phone traffic. This act of terrorism had occurred as if in a vacuum. No leaks, no chatter, nothing until the warning less than half an hour before the attack. The denizens of the Sit Room had been monitoring security traffic all morning and there had been nothing but a handful of false leads.
Margaret pinched the bridge of her nose with one hand and reached for the sandwich with the other. Her eyes were on a computer display that showed the area around the wreck of the Washington Monument. It was crawling with investigators. They were especially concentrated around the crane and were disassembling the engine and hydraulics, looking for sabotage. There was no doubt they’d find something. The crane had clearly been under the control of an outside party.
She shifted her attention to the Apache. It was inarguable that their own helicopter gunner had brought the obelisk down. That was troubling enough. But the kid had a clean record of exemplary service and was a devout Methodist with no Islamic connections. Most disconcerting was that the gunner claimed he had discarded the idea of using a Hydra on the crane because of possible damage to the monument. He was devastated by what he saw as a failure on his part.
Margaret was fairly certain he’d had nothing to do with the behavior of the crane.
“You know,” said Curtis, chewing on his own sandwich, “we’ve already started getting people asking when we’re going to rebuild.”
“Mm. No surprise there. I bet we’ve also had the requisite number of conspiracy theorists who claim the White House is at the bottom of it.”
Curt smiled wanly. “Conspiracist Clue: President Ellis in the National Mall with a rogue crane.”
The sandwich tasted like sawdust. Margaret chewed and swallowed anyway.
The door to the Sit Room opened and Admiral Hand reentered, her jet-black brows drawn together in a perplexed frown. “Madam President, there’s someone I think you should talk to. I took him to Curtis’s office.”
Curt frowned. “Who is it, Joan?”
“A student from Maryland State who says the Al Sabbah video we’ve been shown is a fraud.”
“What? Our experts—”
“Apparently don’t read lips.”
Two minutes later, huddled in Curtis Chamberlin’s office, sandwich forgotten, Margaret leaned against Curt’s desk and looked down into the terrified eyes of a college junior whom Joan introduced as Keyvan Tahir. The young man was nearly trembling and his knuckles were white as he gripped the arms of his chair.
“Tell the president what you told me,” Joan said quietly.
“Well, I was watching the replays of the video on CNN,” Keyvan said, “and my roommate asked if I could please turn down the sound because he
was trying to study. When I did, I realized that the man in the video is not saying what the audio claims he is saying. I think it’s an old video, because the man in it is talking about an attack on a school in Mosul.”
“How . . . ?” Margaret started to ask.
“I told you,” Joan reminded her. “Keyvan reads lips.”
The young man nodded. “I lost my hearing when I was three and didn’t get it back until I had a surgery in sixth grade. I learned to lip-read Arabic and English—my grandparents didn’t speak much English back then.”
Margaret stood and held out her hand to the boy. “Thank you, Keyvan, you’ve just done your country a great service. If you don’t mind, there are some other people I’d like you to talk to about this.”
He shook her hand solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. However I can help. There is one more thing. I mean, it’s sort of subjective I guess but—”
Margaret stopped him. “No, please. Tell us whatever you feel might be meaningful.”
“Well, I grew up around a lot of people from Egypt and other Arab countries who speak English as a second language. The guy in the voice-over . . . he didn’t sound like a native Arabic speaker to me. I think it was someone faking an accent. It was good, but it didn’t sound authentic. That’s just my opinion, but—”
“Keyvan,” said the president, “right now, I trust your opinion more than I trust my own ears. Thank you.” She looked at Joan Hand. “Admiral, would you set up a briefing for the Joint Chiefs and DHS personnel and have Keyvan repeat what he’s told us? If you think it might be helpful, perhaps he could sit with your analysts and review the video. Then we need to start this investigation all over again—from a completely different angle.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hand rose and escorted Keyvan from the room. She turned back at the door long enough to give Margaret a significant look. “I just might offer Mr. Tahir a job when he gets out of college.”
“That might not be a bad idea.”
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