Her chief of staff opined that Bluth was like a Chihuahua. “You know what I mean,” Curt said during a private conversation. “He believes with all the fervor of his little doggie heart that he’s a Great Dane. Seeing a bigger dog doesn’t faze him in the least. It only makes him bark more energetically.”
The problem with that, of course, was that the Zetas had them on a leash that seemed to be getting shorter by the day. For every demand that Congress resisted, the Zeta leader, Sara Crowell, made a new one or suggested that the price of resistance would increase. She had already insisted that they throw open the entirety of the NSA’s considerable intranet and databases, with the threat of exposing what she and her crew already had access to. The larger threat that hung over every interaction like the sword of Damocles was that they might reveal publicly what was really going on up on Mount Olympus.
Margaret didn’t want to contemplate what the public would make of their government being held hostage by a trio of human beings with the sort of abilities you only read about in comic books or saw on TV and movie screens. It would be like waking up one morning to find that Batman and the Joker were real and battling over Chicago instead of Gotham.
That made molding the public perception of what was happening crucial and problematic. The story they had released to the media in small chunks was that homegrown terrorists from a previously unknown organization they had dubbed the Triad had taken over a shuttered government facility within the Michaux State Preserve and was armed to the teeth and threatening unspecified terrorist acts. The military had them surrounded, but they had access to the Internet and were making threats against American civilians. The Ellis administration was working to corral them and disrupt their operations. The story had the virtue of being true in its essentials and therefore fit the real-world happenings closely, insofar as events in the United States were concerned.
This did not, of course, silence the conspiracy theorists. They worked 24/7 at spinning amazing yarns in the darkest shades of purple. Somehow those never sank to the lurid depths of what was happening in reality. When Al Jazeera had run with a terrifying video of the attempted Taliban takeover of the Afghani National Assembly, the conspiracists had first called it an alien invasion, and then a complete hoax.
Margaret was surprised that Congress hadn’t sprung a leak with regard to the superhuman abilities of these homegrown terrorists, but perhaps even opportunistic politicos understood that some things were too scary for public consumption.
Even Bluth resisted disseminating that information.
It had already been necessary to intercept repeated attempts by various parties to sneak into Michaux and contact the Triad leadership. The Pentagon had used a number of elite forces from all branches of the military to draw a tight but nearly invisible perimeter around Pine Ridge and had so far been able to keep all comers out. As a happy coincidence, not needing those forces on foreign soil made it a lot easier to deploy them here.
Margaret prayed that would continue. Having card-carrying members of the tinfoil brigade break through the perimeter was too terrifying to contemplate—not because of anything they might do, but because of what the Zetas might do to them. So far—other than Dr. Streegman and various armed mercenaries—no American civilians had been killed in the Zetas’ pursuit of global justice, and Margaret didn’t even want to imagine what might happen if that changed. The thought of Roman Bluth and his cadre gaining traction for a military strike on American soil conjured images of the great Wyrm Ouroboros eating its own tail. Margaret Ellis wasn’t certain that wouldn’t be the beginning of the end of the union.
The problem was, though, that while it had been possible for Ellis to flex her executive muscles on a lot of the Zetas’ demands, Sara Crowell had essentially issued an ultimatum that was constitutionally unattainable and democratically unthinkable. Even if it could be met, Sara and her two partners would be calling the shots. A tyrannical triumvirate ruling the world from beneath a mountain, it was something out of myth. Her one concession—that the government could continue to seem to be in control if they met the impossible demands—was meaningless. It wasn’t Margaret Ellis’s personal control that was at issue—it was the right of U.S. citizens to self-determination.
It struck her hard, then: the world had changed irrevocably and there was no prior history that could help her deal with the threat the Zetas posed. This really was terra incognita; falling back into old thought habits would ultimately be self-defeating.
On the heels of that horrific epiphany, Margaret called Joan Hand and Curt Chamberlin to the Oval Office and sat down to discuss how they could reach Charles Brenton without creating even more public chaos.
“We clear?” Chuck asked, falling into a seat between Dice and Lanfen at the conference table in his office. It was 6 a.m. and the rest of the facility was still and dark.
Lanfen sat unmoving for a moment, her eyes closed.
“Clear.”
“Fantastic. Let’s go. First problem: I can’t get Lorstad to give an inch on his conviction that he has to shield us from what the Alphas are doing and from the chaos they’re causing outside. I’ve stopped pressing, because he’s looking for any excuse to cut us off from the world completely again. We’ve gone into transactional mode. I give him something; he gives me something. I told you he asked how I healed Joey. I didn’t tell him everything, and I’m certain he knows that. He’s not going to let us go until we’ve been able to make Zetas out of his novices and given him a formula for predictable results I’m not even sure exists.”
“Okay,” said Euge. “Then what are our options?”
Chuck took a deep breath, knowing what he was about to suggest would not be popular. No one had enjoyed their terrifying and exhausting initial cross-country flight, or hiding out in Doug Boston’s beachfront cottage hoping not to be found.
“We may need to pull off another great escape. Lanfen has been monitoring the new security measures and she thinks it’s doable. The greatest outstanding problem we have is securing transport.”
“Maybe Joey can help with that,” Dice suggested.
“As much as I’d like to believe we can trust him,” Chuck said, “I’m not sure we can. We need to keep Joey out of this—at least for now. That’s for his own protection as well as our own. He doesn’t have to conceal what he doesn’t know. Make sense?”
He looked around the table at the furrowed brows and felt their anxiety as a creeping of the skin across the bridge of his nose. Weird. One by one, they nodded.
“Lanfen, can you give a rundown on what you’ve found?”
She pushed her iPad to the center of the table. “Okay, here’s an elevation of the house and its surroundings. Yellow triangles mark cameras; red squares mark laser sensors; green lines indicate patrol routes. There are three pairs of men in the patrol. The teams are equidistant from each other and patrol at a distance of twenty yards from the house. They’re in constant motion. So, if you’re looking down on the desert from the deck”—she tapped the screen with a finger—“one of the patrols will go by below at intervals of eight minutes.”
“Eight minutes!” repeated Eugene. “That doesn’t give us a lot of time to get out of their way.”
“No, it does not. But, we have an ace up our sleeve. We have Mini.”
All eyes turned to the pert strawberry blonde. She grinned.
“Mini can make them see—or not see—whatever we want. She can also fool the cameras.”
“But I can’t fool the lasers,” Mini admitted. “I’m not sure why, exactly, but I think it’s because while I can construct ‘real’ things that have a sort of substance, I can’t make substance go away. Invisibility is just an illusion; the lasers will still hit something solid if one of us blunders into them.”
“So,” Lanfen added, “I have to take care of the lasers my way. Which should be fine, because I think I can jam them without making it glaringly apparent they’ve been jammed. That means we just have to solve the transpor
tation problem.”
“What if we forget about trying to escape into the desert and just go straight for their vehicles?” Dice asked.
“For starters, I’m not even sure where they keep the vehicles,” said Chuck, “which I’m sure is what they intend.”
“They’re housed here.” Dice put a fingertip solidly on a blank area just to the north of the house. “It’s underground and the entry is screened behind some boulders and a couple of piñons. It’s connected to the house through the solarium on that side, and to the highest level of the underground facility through the med wing.”
Chuck stared at his robotics expert. “How do you know all that?”
Dice tapped his temple. “Schematics. I’ve been practicing my art by tracing the electrical and data trails throughout the installation. It’s amazing how much you can determine about a space by the way its circuitry is laid out. If we can get to the vehicles physically, we can manipulate any electronic or computerized systems that are involved in their storage or monitoring.”
Chuck found himself nodding. “Yes. That makes a lot more sense than trying to escape across the desert.”
Mini was smiling again, mischief in every dimple. “But when we finally make our move,” she said, “I bet I can convince them that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
Euge gave her a wide-eyed look of awe. “Have I told you lately how amazing you are?”
“Last night?”
Eugene blushed from the base of his neck to the roots of his hair.
Even Dice laughed.
“Incoming,” said Lanfen when their nervous mirth had been spent. “Joey’s in the lab. We should probably open the meeting up and welcome him back from the dead.” Chuck nodded and Lanfen moved to open the door and invite the engineer in. Dice turned to Chuck and lowered his voice. “You said you were afraid Lorstad would cut us off from the outside world again.”
“Yes. I know he’s still blocking things he doesn’t want us to see.”
“Not as of this morning, he’s not. And he can’t. He can’t block incoming content and he can’t keep us from messaging out. I can keep us connected to the outside world no matter what he does—unless he’s willing to cut the entire Center off from his own intranet, and I’m willing to bet he’d never do that.”
“How?” Chuck asked, nearly whispering. He could hear Lanfen chatting happily with Joey at the office door.
Dice’s smile was strained. “Like I said, I’ve been practicing.”
Kristian was not blind to the frustration and unease among Charles Brenton’s team. He warned the Learned Council that this unease and dissatisfaction could yield rebellion, but they doubted these new “talents” posed any challenge for the Learned residing at the Center. Lorstad could not convince them otherwise. Alexis was no help. She flatly told the Council that he was enamored of the Zetas and grossly overestimated their abilities.
How much he wanted to yell at them that they grossly underestimated the Zetas. But he knew it wouldn’t get anywhere.
Kristian left the videoconference with the same mandate he’d always had: work with the Zetas to quantify the Brenton-Streegman process for training zeta talents and explore the possibility that a Zeta exposed to their technology and immersion might be the ultimate in human enhancement. He knew, of course, that Brenton’s frustration had already resulted in token resistance. He was aware of Lanfen’s jamming of Center surveillance, knew how often Eugene collided with their reverse firewall, and suspected they discussed more than training programs and formulas in their private meetings in Brenton’s office.
He allowed them their little subterfuges. If he’d learned one thing in his lifetime, it was to choose his battles carefully. Thus he let the Zetas believe they were advancing in some manner so they would continue their work without direct confrontation. Still, it was clear to him, if not to Alexis and the other members of the Council, that in order to ensure Brenton’s continued cooperation, he was going to have to make concessions that went beyond nominal access to the Internet. If he made the right compromises, he might even be able to enlist the help of someone inside Charles Brenton’s tight organization. Because it had not escaped Kristian’s attention that four of them had paired off, leaving Daisuke Kobayashi as the odd man out. There might be a point of ingress there. In the meantime, Lorstad believed he might have found a means of winning Mini’s trust as well.
One way or another, he was going to get what he needed from them. And then he could worry about what to do with Charles Brenton and their little rebellion.
Mini sensed Lorstad before she heard him call her name. She looked up from the corps of eight miniature dancers she had created and set in motion to see him approaching from the lab doorway. She smiled at him but knew the smile didn’t go all the way to her eyes. She had liked this man at first, but gradually had come to feel that she was less a person to him than an interesting puzzle to solve . . . or an asset. His obvious dismay over her relationship with Eugene made her angry; his unsubtle attempts to inure her to the immersion labs made her nervous. She shook herself free of dark thoughts as he drew near.
His eyes went to the dancing figures on her worktable. “What are these? Mini, they are wonderful!” He stopped to watch them perform the intricate moves of a quadrille.
“They’re a sort of drill,” she explained. “I’m working at manipulating a group of figures through complex patterns. You see, I have to consider their form, the details of hair and dress, and the patterns of movement before I set them in motion.”
“You’ve become a programmer,” Lorstad enthused.
“Me? A programmer?” She laughed and knew from the light in his eyes that he was delighted. The idea smothered her mirth. She glanced across the lab at where Eugene worked at his computer, going over the data from their sessions with several new novice Learned. He didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t watching. He was frightened for her, she realized, and that frightened her, too.
“I’m just an artist,” she parried.
Lorstad shook his head. “As Charles and I have told you repeatedly, there is no ‘just’ when it comes to your spectacular talent. In fact, I think your mastery would be very helpful to me with a most delicate situation.”
“Really? How so?”
He glanced back at the dancers. “Can you re-create these anywhere?”
“Of course.”
“Then come. I’d like you to meet someone.” He held out his hand.
“Who?”
“We have a new initiate who has just been sent to us from Estonia. She is young and a bit frightened and very shy about entering into company. I think if she met you, she might be less afraid. And if she were to see what you can do, I think she might very much want to do it herself. Will you come meet her?”
She glanced at Eugene again, then at Lorstad’s hand. She folded her own hands in front of her, smiled, and said, brightly, “Lead on, Macduff.”
He frowned slightly at the snub but quickly regained his composure, withdrew his hand, and turned to escort her from the room. She felt Eugene’s anxious regard until they were out of his line of sight. She knew a pair of disembodied lips planting a peck on his cheek then vanishing would be a small yet effective balm for his nerves, and so she sent her message of assurance to the man she loved.
Eugene watched Lorstad escort Mini from the lab, his mind fighting turmoil. He didn’t trust Lorstad and knew that Mini didn’t, either. At least that was what he construed from her refusal to take the older man’s hand.
He fumed for a moment, wishing he could be a fly on the wall or that he had epic zeta abilities. In the midst of berating himself for being such a schlub when it came to learning how to master his own brain waves, he suddenly realized that he had the next-best thing. He thought of a box in his mind—a beautiful golden chest—and imagined it opening. His mini Mini popped out and he pictured her sitting on the upper edge of his keyboard. She appeared there as solid and real as when Mini had first conjured her.
He focused all his attention on her face so he could read every expression.
Then he felt it, a peck on his cheek. He swore he heard a giggle. He touched his face where the phantom smooch had landed. A kiss and his mini Mini were the perfect remedy. He couldn’t completely relax, but at least he wouldn’t go completely nuts.
“They still danced,” Lorstad said as they approached the elevator core. “Even as we left the room, the little fairies danced. How did you accomplish that?”
Mini shrugged, her eyes on the elevator, wondering if he would take her to the med wing. “It’s like you said, I guess. I programmed them. I gave them a pattern to follow and they followed it. They’ll follow it until I change it or . . . put them away.”
“Why fairies?”
She shrugged. “When I was a little girl I had a fairy-tale book that had a story in it about a box full of fairies that loved to come out of their box and dance. But if you let them out, it was almost impossible to get them to go back in.” She paused, struck by a sudden thought. “That’s like our zeta abilities, isn’t it? Fairies you can’t put back in the box; genies you can’t get back into the bottle.”
“Ah, Mini, you are an astonishment. The perfect balance of creative whimsy and wisdom. Yulia will adore you.”
She glanced at him in surprise. “That’s the first time you’ve called me ‘Mini.’”
“I suppose I have learned to call you that because those closest to you call you that. I bow to their wisdom where you are concerned.”
They got into the elevator and Mini tensed, dreading the elevator’s descent. She relaxed when, instead, it rose. When the doors opened, she found herself in what must have been the uppermost level of the house on the side opposite her own room. They stepped out into a transverse corridor with a wall papered in raw silk of spring green and broken by several doors. Lorstad steered her to the left toward the uphill side of the house, then left again at the next intersection. He stopped at a door on the right side at the end of the hall. He knocked, but there was no answer.
The God Peak Page 20