“Report!” ordered the Blake who had hidden inside the kettle after he was certain the firing had ceased.
“All hostiles down,” reported four voices in his comm at the same time.
Seconds later the door to the back of the truck slid open to reveal the two Blakes inside. The moment he had given the go command, the Blake in the kettle had come out firing, killing the major as he was spinning around and drawing his weapon.
Six Blakes were now alive, but that wouldn’t be true for long. Only one was destined to complete the mission, and even he would die soon thereafter as the kettle exploded inside Kim’s bedroom.
All six remembered the thought process Blake had undergone when there had only been one of him, knowing he was about to produce many, condemning them to death.
Was this an absolute necessity? he had asked himself. Why couldn’t a handful of surviving Blakes be allowed to go on living?
After all, he loved a challenge, living dangerously, pitting his skills against a merciless world to try to stay alive. The duplicates would know that the Blake back in the States held title to his name and life. So they could use their cunning to try to escape from China. They could find a tropical island somewhere to settle down, changing their identities. They wouldn’t have to die. They’d only have to disappear from the grid and forge a new life outside of America.
But as tempting as this was, Blake had realized it wasn’t possible. The risk was too great. What if three or four of the duplicates were killed? Four Caucasians in China of the exact same build. The authorities would soon connect the dots and realize they were identical, down to their scars and the cavities in their teeth, which even identical twins wouldn’t share. This would raise too many questions. The Chinese would spend extraordinary resources getting to the bottom of it, hunting for other Blakes around the world, digging with the manpower and persistence that only China could manage, and possibly discovering the Blake in America along the way.
And what if one of the Blakes was captured? They would all go to heroic lengths not to be taken alive, but there were no guarantees. Even though Blake was confident a copy of him would never talk, there was no telling what experimental drugs or methods the Chinese might use to force information from him. Information like the existence of Q5. The reality of time travel.
In the final analysis, there was no way out. Allowing multiple Blakes to live was not an option. Many more Blakes, each as human as the original, would be forced to condemn themselves to death in service to the greater cause.
Blake had learned what he needed to know to possibly get his mission back on track. But the cost had been very high.
And not just to the Chinese soldiers he had slaughtered.
46
“Report,” said Blake as he sped through the night on a motorcycle that had been sent back through time. A split-second younger version of the bike was still back at the truck.
“No sign of any activity,” replied one of the Blakes at the site of the massacre, who had been designated as the liaison to the one now traveling.
“Excellent,” said Blake as he hurtled northward as quickly as he could. If additional soldiers hadn’t heard the flash-bangs and gunfire and sent reinforcements by now, they never would. Even so, the Blake who had been stationed within the kettle had returned to his position there, just in case.
“We’ve stacked all of the dead bodies together,” reported the liaison, “combing the woods nearby for any human . . . debris . . . we might have missed. We’ve plotted out the best path for the truck to take to get back to the road, and marked it with floods, which we’ll turn on when it’s ready to leave.”
“Good work,” said Blake. “Thanks. I’ll call in with updates as soon as I have them.”
He ended the call and increased the speed of the bike even further. “K-1,” he said to the kettle supercomputer, still tied into his comm, “how much longer until I reach the truck stop?”
“At your average speed, sixteen more minutes.”
Blake frowned. Still plenty of time—if everything went right. But if he was stopped, or had trouble carrying out the next phase of the mission, it would be a different story. And if Long had lied about the helo that was slowly coming this way, the mission would go down in flames. Not that the major had any reason to lie, but it was always a possibility.
Fourteen minutes later Blake arrived at the truck stop K-1 had directed him to. It was clean and looked to be fairly new, with an extensive parking area, eight fueling stations, a restaurant, and a facility with fifteen showers. Dozens of semis were parked in the lot, with dozens more refueling at one of the many islands.
There were more than eight million semis in China. Eight million. And all Blake needed was one of them.
He abandoned his motorcycle and helmet and carefully hid behind a parked truck near the restaurant’s exit.
Less than five minutes later a short truck driver approached Blake’s position on his way out to the lot. The trucker was dressed in a black T-shirt and baseball cap, with the same Chinese lettering on both, Grand Panda Trucking, which K-1 displayed on Blake’s contact lens in English.
Blake drew his phone from a pocket and slipped out from behind the truck as the man passed, following him as quietly as a shadow. K-1 had programmed the phone to his specifications, so it would speak one of the Chinese phrases he had pre-programmed in each time he hit a circular icon on the screen.
“Excuse me,” said Blake pleasantly to the man in English, now only five feet ahead.
The man wheeled around, startled, unaware that anyone had been nearby.
When the trucker completed his turn, Blake pressed the circular icon on his phone. “Make a sound and you’re dead!” said the phone in Chinese, like the evil son of Siri and Cortana. Blake pointed a gun at the trucker’s chest at the same time.
The man’s eyes widened, but he heeded the warning the phone had given, and remained silent.
Blake pressed the icon a second time. “Give me your keys and lead me to your truck,” said the phone. “Cooperate and you won’t get hurt. Cross me and you’ll die very painfully.”
Once again, Blake was keenly aware that this was an innocent man, and was sickened by what he was doing. At least this was a positive sign. The moment something like this no longer troubled him was the moment he had truly become a monster.
The trucker’s breath seemed to catch in his throat. His eyes darted wildly, desperate to identify a source of rescue, without success. Blake extended his gun and pressed the circular icon on his phone one last time. “Move!” it demanded. “Now!”
The trucker swallowed hard and then turned around and continued his journey, with Blake so close behind they were almost touching. Four minutes later they arrived at the man’s truck, parked among dozens of others in the poorly lit lot.
“Thank you,” said Blake pleasantly in English when they reached their destination. This said, he slammed the butt of his gun savagely into the man’s skull, knocking him to the ground. He confirmed that the trucker still had a pulse and then slowly, with herculean effort, pulled the trucker’s dead weight into the passenger side of the large cab.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, removing the trucker’s hat and placing it on his own head to disguise his Caucasian hair.
Blake pulled out of the truck stop and headed due north. Three miles later he passed through another of the ubiquitous woodland areas and pulled off the road, dragging the unconscious driver into the woods and forcing a pill down his throat. The poor trucker would awaken eight hours later, sore but well rested. Most importantly, he would come out of this alive.
Which is more than Blake could say for himself.
He opened the back of the trailer and climbed inside. Fortunately, the trucker must have already made a delivery, as one fourth of the trailer nearest the door was empty. The remainder of the large compartment was stuffed to the gills with wooden pallets, stacked high with colorful running shoes, at least as evidenced by the pictures o
n the outside of the boxes.
Blake positioned himself at the exact center of the empty space within the trailer. “K-1,” he called out. “Can I assume you’re still reading me?”
“Loud and clear,” responded the supercomputer, still inside the semi he had left in the woods.
“Good. Do you have my precise GPS coordinates?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to send K-2 back into the past. Can you arrange the settings and time interval to land it precisely where I’m standing?”
“Negative,” replied the supercomputer after the briefest of pauses. “You’re in between 45.15 microsecond intervals.”
“Understood,” said Blake. He peeled off the adhesive on a nickel-sized sensor, activated it, and stuck it to the floor by his feet. “Are you reading the sensor I just activated and placed nearby?”
“I am.”
“Good. Track this sensor as it moves, and name it the bull’s-eye.”
“Done,” said K-1.
“Good. I’m in the back end of a semi-tractor-trailer. I will take two steps in the direction the vehicle is facing, so you can determine its heading.” He took two small steps forward. “Was this sufficient?”
“Yes.”
“If I moved the truck forward, in the direction of my steps, how far would I have to go for you to be able to land K-2 on the bull’s-eye?
“Twenty-two feet, five inches,” replied K-1.
“Good. I’m going to get in the cab and start the truck. Then I’ll begin inching it forward. Tell me when I’ve arrived in a position that will allow you to place K-2 where I’ve specified.”
Blake proceeded as he had outlined, until K-1 called a halt. Less than a minute later Blake confirmed that a copy of the inner kettle had materialized inside the trailer, a perfect shot from forty-five miles away.
Blake returned to the cab and continued on his original heading. After driving another twelve miles, he was rewarded for his efforts by the sound of a slow-moving helicopter approaching his position from the north. One not only traveling at a snail’s pace, but progressing through a moving window of tight circles, an obvious search pattern.
Blake allowed himself a smile as the helo abruptly changed course to come closer to his position, and then followed his truck from a discreet distance thereafter.
“Sense anything interesting?” he said aloud to the aircraft.
Had the helo made it farther south and detected the dark energy signature of the truck in the woods, the mission would have been over. But Blake had managed to throw this dog the very bone it was after, just in time.
He could only imagine the frenzy the Chinese who were after him must now be in, hastily accumulating enough force to subdue him, even if he tried to use the heavy truck as a weapon. He wondered how long it would take for the military to strike. He put the over/under at a half-hour, and placed his own bet on the under.
Sure enough, twenty-four minutes later, dozens of cars, military trucks, and helicopters appeared out of nowhere, with impressive coordination, surrounding him on all sides as well as from above. Four of the helos were armed with machine guns and missiles.
“Stop and you won’t be harmed,” boomed a voice in English at an incredible decibel level, emanating from an unknown source.
Blake sighed and slowly rolled to a stop.
“Good news,” he reported to the Blake handling communications back at the original truck. “I’m about fifty-seven miles north of your position, and the Chinese have taken the bait.”
He now had little doubt the plan would work exactly as he had laid it out in his head. The Chinese were looking for him and a Sub-Zero refrigerator with a dark energy signature, and they had now found both.
They could never guess that both he and the refrigerator were capable of being fruitful and multiplying.
Now that the Chinese had their prize, Blake would be astonished if the roadblocks at all critical arteries weren’t disbanded within the hour.
“Outstanding,” said his liaison, although his enthusiasm was somewhat diminished by the fact that this success would hasten his own death. “I’ll let the others know.”
Blake ended the communication and watched the scene outside of his window in fascination. Dozens of armed soldiers were making their way slowly to the cab from all directions.
He knew exactly how this would play out. Once he was captured and bound, and brought to a detention facility, a professional interrogator would be assigned to him. Blake would lead this man on a wild goose chase for as long as he could. Tease him that the answers he was looking for were right around the corner.
Then, as soon as Blake decided that relatively few people were within range of the kettle, he would command its detonation, which would kill him and turn the kettle into slag.
Another Blake was even now setting off on a motorcycle to check the status of the roadblocks. As soon as they were confirmed down, the Blake who was now inside the kettle in the original truck would emerge to continue his journey to the Chinese-Korean border. All other Blakes would gather near the wall of corpses they had built.
Once the semi was forty or fifty miles away, the Blake who was driving would order K-1 to teleport a copy of the inner kettle as close to this wall of corpses—and his still-living brethren—as possible, triggering its onboard octa-nitro-cubane and vaporizing all.
He forced himself not to think about how close he and his numerous alter egos were to death. He had volunteered for this mission, after all, and had known he wouldn’t come out alive.
Blake took a deep breath, opened the cab door, and jumped to the pavement, his hands high over his head. “Okay,” he said unnecessarily. “I surrender.”
A wry smile came over his face. “But are you sure you brought enough men?” he added, rolling his eyes.
47
Nathan Wexler and Jenna Morrison strolled together along a honeycombed maze of corridors, working their way to the conference room assigned to Q5, where the unparalleled physicist would finally discuss the fifth dimension in terms he hoped a layman like Blake would understand. Not that the material was easy to get one’s mind around, even without introducing the brutal mathematics that caused searing migraine headaches in even the world’s most accomplished mathematicians and physicists. But he hoped his presentation would at least provide a glimmer of the possibilities.
Provided he could keep his feet on the ground long enough to get through the preliminary discussions. Not easy to do given the considerable progress he had made coming up with a time travel suppressor, already. Even less easy to do considering he had extended this work in an unexpected direction, potentially solving one of the biggest mysteries in all of cosmology, and opening up possibilities both terrifying and magnificent.
His plan was to wait until the end to share this discovery with the group, but he was so flush with excitement he thought he might levitate to the ceiling and blurt it out at any moment in a fit of giddy enthusiasm. He had to remind himself that while the potential discovery was looking promising, it was still only a theory. More work needed to be done to confirm it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But if he was able to confirm it, it would be extraordinary. Revolutionary. Arguably the greatest discovery in all of human history. It would shake society to its very core—if he could ever disclose it, that is.
Wexler couldn’t imagine being much happier than he was at this moment. Working on momentous projects with people he admired, and Jenna by his side. And say what you might about Edgar Knight’s motives and ethics, his brilliance could not be questioned. He had managed to prove out Wexler’s theories in the real world through intuition and force of will alone.
Wexler’s only complaint was with his surroundings. If not for the camaraderie and intellectual stimulation, he was sure he would be going absolutely batty, living with no direct sunlight and in claustrophobic conditions only a mole rat could love. The Cheyenne Mountain bunker complex was undeniably remarkable, but mankind had evolved to l
ive in the great outdoors, not inside a mountain.
When they arrived at the conference room, Wexler took a seat at the head of the table and tested his computer to be sure he could send his primitive visuals to the main monitor above him. Before long the rest of the senior management team arrived, but the four invited members of Q5’s Inner Circle not on assignment elsewhere appeared to be no-shows.
The Inner Circle was now under Blake’s purview. Its members knew about time travel and Q5’s goals, but weren’t formally members of the senior management team. They played the roles of operations management, security, and muscle, as needed.
Each member was bright, talented, highly trained, and deadly. Knight and his men had recently killed a number of them, severely thinning out their ranks, and Q5 was still stinging from these losses.
Cargill rose from his chair as soon as the last of the senior management team arrived. “Sorry, Nathan,” he began, “but I need to share something with you, Daniel, and Jenna before we begin. News that can’t wait.”
His troubled expression made it clear that this particular news was anything but good. “As you all know, Q5 was originally designated a black weapons program. In the beginning, I reported to a Colonel Hank Vargas. When Edgar made his breakthrough discoveries, we were able to get President Janney to agree to pull us away from this group and give us total autonomy.”
“Right,” said Jenna. “We remember the story. You were convinced this Colonel Vargas was a real-life Dr. Strangelove.”
Cargill nodded. “That’s right. But this argument alone didn’t convince the president.”
“Then what did?” asked Jenna.
“The security and privacy arguments,” replied Cargill. “The more people in the loop, the more likely you get a leak. I’m pretty sure the likelihood goes up exponentially with every person added.
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