“What?” That diverted me from trying to find Eric guilty. “What will kill us all?”
Eric scrambled to his feet, bringing Thanh up with him. “The device locates targets and assassinates. It’s lethal.”
“But they don’t have the capability,” Byron argued. “They haven’t set up any receptors or anything. It could take days.”
“Unless they already have it set up?” Thanh rubbed her raw fingers against her face. She knew what she was talking about. “Everything’s in place. The control box is the last piece of the puzzle…almost, but not quite.”
“They said there was a missing piece,” Byron said. “Can you confirm that?”
She nodded. “Yes, to the frequency remote. Did you look in your backpack?”
He shook his head, looking grim. I stepped forward, giving a halfhearted wave. “They stole it before I could get it out of there.” It hurt to admit, especially when Thanh’s face drained of all color like that.
“Then they have it all,” she said in a hopeless voice.
“No.” Byron shook his head. “They might not. We might have a chance.”
I was as much out of the loop as Cameron and friends. “I don’t understand.”
“The missing piece will enable them to lock onto a frequency,” Byron explained, “A target. And then that target will be assassinated.”
“All they’d need to do is lock into a cell phone,” Thanh said through quivering lips. “They’ll target its frequency and kill whoever has it. The victim doesn’t have to pick up the phone even. It’s as simple as getting one call and you’re dead.”
Byron took a deep breath. “They’re going to reach out and touch someone.”
“Really Byron? Was that really necessary?” I cried. “Thanh! Why did you invent something like this? What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t trying to! I wanted to invent free energy…like Tesla. I…I…” she glanced at my blank face, “in layman’s terms, I wanted to send energy through frequencies by priming the air. One push of a button and it powers a dead car on the road by locking onto its frequency, another zap and it powers a whole city. No need for generators or batteries or gas.”
“But they’ll only use it against us.” Byron pushed from us to pace the parking lot. I knew he was trying to formulate a plan. It was almost impossible when we didn’t know what direction Sandra and Hölle had gone. “As soon as the government recognized the project’s destructive capabilities as a potential weapon,” he said, “our team was sent on a PSD to keep an eye on Thanh and shut down the project if necessary. Only they sent the wrong people.”
Thanh let out a low moan. “We’ve got to do something before it’s too late!”
Eric wrapped an arm around her. “I won’t see you in danger again. They’ll kill anyone who’s a threat.”
That was all of us.
Thanh’s shoulders lowered. “A lot of people will die if we don’t do something. The device won’t just kill its target, but anyone standing in its path. It isn’t fully functional yet. The test run will be a disaster.”
“I’ve got to warn headquarters,” Byron said. He was a mess. Black paint blemished the whiteness of his once pristine tee. His jeans were ripped down the knee, his dark hair mashed down like a cat licked it. He looked very un-Byron-like—more so because I never saw him look so much like a soldier. “I’ll make them listen,” he growled, bringing his iPhone to his ear then turning pale, he lowered it. “The device is on.”
My heart dropped. “How do you know?”
“It’s wiping out all communication. They’re priming the air.” Testing out Byron’s theory, I picked up his old iPhone. The screensaver glowed through my hand. The reception was dead. We were stuck in the current of a nightmare. Byron met my eyes. “It’s interfering with the frequencies.”
Cameron and his girlfriends messed with their cell phones with no luck. Eric cradled Thanh’s head against his shoulder to comfort her, but his eyes were on me. What was his problem? He claimed his girl, now leave me alone. I lowered my borrowed phone. Byron climbed onto the roof of his car, the veins on his arms standing out. His Suburban groaned in complaint as he scanned the distance. “Where’s the tallest building around here?”
Obviously. It covered the moon with its long and mournful shadow. “The Provocity towers,” I breathed. How ironic.
Byron dropped his hands. “It’s going to need all that electricity to make this thing work for its test run. Just tap into the cabling and wires that already exist. One generator would be more than enough. Once they figure out how to prime the air, they’ll test it. They’ve got their dish, their antennas. All they needed was that missing piece to target the frequency.”
“And thanks to us, they’ve got it.” I met Eric’s eyes over Thanh’s head. He looked down.
Byron scooted off the black Suburban, grabbing my arm in a strong grip. “Head to the police department. They’re the closest thing we’ve got for help around here.”
“Not Madeleine,” Eric reminded him. “They won’t listen to her.”
I cast him an angry look. Byron stared at him then nodded. “You’re right, not Mad.” I glared at Byron as he circled to Cameron.
Cameron threw his hands up. “I don’t even know where the police station is!”
Did anybody? The girls studied their painted toes with renewed interest. “Center Street,” Byron intoned slowly. “You might be able to find a signal to call them once you’re far enough away from here.” He still held tightly to my arm. “You’re not coming with me, Madeleine.” He dragged me from his car. Byron had always seemed so composed before turning agent. Before I could argue, he tried to give me back to Cameron. “Take Mad and Thanh out of here.”
“No.” I peeled my fingers free from Byron’s. “You need my help.”
“Stop being such a martyr.” Eric gripped my elbow and shoved me headfirst into the leather bench seat in Byron’s black Suburban. I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or not. “You need our help,” he told Byron. “I’m going too. Someone has to cover you.”
“No!” Thanh wouldn’t have any of it. “Eric. Please, stay with me!”
Eric’s fingers found her hair and he stroked the long strands away from her face. “I’m responsible for this. Now that you’re safe, I have to help these guys. It’s the least I can do. Get the police. Explain everything to them. Please, Thanh. I don’t want anything to happen to you, not after all I’ve done to keep you safe.”
Thanh’s lip trembled and she nodded. Her fragile eyes tearing up. I was touched…in an odd sort of way. He still had been flirting with me to get the device. Dirty player. Byron climbed into his car and gave me an exasperated look when he saw me on the bench next to him. “What are you still doing here?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
Luckily he didn’t. He just groaned. “Don’t be too happy about this. You’re not going to like it.” Byron turned the keys in his ignition. The radio spat out fuzz—another side-effect of the stolen device. It was too distracting and he flipped it off, throwing his arm around me to back out of Denny’s parking lot. We sped down Bulldog Avenue. The night was black ahead of us, the towers bathed in a blanket of velvety ink.
“Tell me exactly what we’re doing,” I said.
“It’s like Thanh said,” Byron said through tight lips. “She wanted to be like Tesla—you remember the crazy guy, right? He wanted free energy. Well, he’s not so crazy. He had a theory on how to do it and if Thanh is right, those terrorists will have set everything up exactly as he proposed on top of the Provocity towers. It’ll transmit energy from the generators straight into the upper atmosphere and prime the air like a pump. Then it will pluck the energy from the air to cause a huge chain reaction with the lower atmosphere that will eventually reach the dish antenna these terrorists set up. There it can focus and reflect this beam anywhere. If they focus it on something about the size of a human head, it’s guaranteed to kill.”
It was the clo
sest I’d ever paid attention to any scientific explanation. “This is just the test run, so anything can happen,” Byron said. “I’m sure they’ll point it at someone important and famous and in the media frenzied aftermath, every terrorist will be scrambling to get their hands on it. It’s in its crude stages now. But once they work out the kinks, it will change the nature of assassination. Find the frequency of a target and key enemies are gone. No one will be safe.”
“With a cell phone.”
“More than that. They’re working on identifying people in more sophisticated ways, though for now, anything with a frequency signal can be targeted. Webcams, GPS, internet users, you name it.”
“Why didn’t the government shut down the project?”
“The potential of the experiment was too overwhelming. According to Tesla, energy can be pulled from the air and transmitted anywhere. It would’ve meant free energy to all with minimal cost and nonexistent prices at the pumps, but then…well, anything can be made into a weapon. They’ll sell it to the highest bidder.”
Eric sat silently in the back. I moved around to face him. “How did you get involved...lover boy?” —Okay, so I should have laid off the sneer.
The leather seat groaned when he shifted. “Thanh and I have been dating for a few years now. She started getting threats and didn’t know who to trust. I transferred from the U to get closer to her. It just got worse from there.”
It was a romantic story; that’s why I was having a hard time swallowing it. “What about the first time I saw you? You were with that guy who attacked me.”
“Walter?”
That was not the name I imagined for him. “Uh, Dune Guy?”
Eric nodded with a grimace. “They told me they’d hurt Thanh if I didn’t help them. I had to do what they said.”
“But Thanh switched her backpack with Byron, and you stole it back. Wait. Did you have it when I jumped into your car with you?”
“She was dead without it. They weren’t even supposed to know the backpack was hers, but the information leaked. I don’t know how.”
That one was my fault. I let Sandra know. I remembered country station night when Eric broke into our apartment. Soon after, our keys to our complex came up missing. I stared at the road ahead of me. The white lines sped past in the darkness. “Did you steal our keys too?”
“I just wanted them to leave Thanh alone.” He sounded testy. “I thought maybe those were the keys everyone was looking for.”
That made sense, but still there were a few holes. I decided to poke at them. “Why did you say you kidnapped Thanh when you talked to me on her cell phone?”
“I never said I kidnap...why would I say that? What? You don’t believe me?”
I leaned back in my seat, not answering. I supposed it was Hölle who had threatened me over the phone then. That made sense, since he called Byron immediately afterward to debrief him on Thanh. Hölle had left the threatening note too. Eric really was some stupid boyfriend trying to protect his girlfriend…and he flirted with me to do it.
I turned to Byron to see if he was buying this. One look at him and I doubted he heard a word. His brow furrowed in concentration, his whole body taut as he raced us closer to danger. The lights faded out down the street. I swiveled, seeing the lights flicker off behind us like blown out candles. “Did you see that?”
“It’s like turning on a hair dryer,” Byron said. I was surprised he had heard me. “The lights are going to dim.”
The Suburban stalled and came to a full stop. We waited a moment, smothered in silence. The only light came from the full moon above the Provocity towers. It covered a huge part of the sky. Eric clasped the back of my seat, pulling my hair with it. “It affects cars too?”
“Their electrical systems.” Byron shoved his door open, fishing through his emergency kit in the back. He pocketed some light sticks. “The air’s polluted with electro smog. They’ve started the test run. Let’s go. We don’t have much time.” Under the light of the moon, we slammed the Suburban doors behind us. Our shoes slapped against the pavement as we ran full speed for the Provocity towers...and whatever else waited for us there.
Chapter Eight
Day 114
0134 hours
“People are getting hurt. I’m not talking broken hearts or Jell-O packets in the shower heads; I’m talking real scary stuff. Things like this happen in New York, Chicago, Ogden even, but here in Provo? Something strange is going on here...and it’s not just the students.
No one is what they seem. The player? A terrorist. The heart-breaker? A no good spy. My neighbor? They’ve taken her. The jerk? A pretty decent guy. My roommate? An utter sneak—but then again I always knew that.
Grades? Dates? Pranks? They’re nothing to the danger that stares us in the face. You’ve got to believe me. If I could go back before everything—before the world went terribly wrong—would I change what I’ve done or have these meaningless pranks made me better able to fight this?”
—Madeleine’s War Journal Entry (Wednesday, June 6th)
Well, that’s what I would’ve written if I had my war journal handy. Later I would…if I survived. For now my war journal sat in my cargo pockets waiting to tell a tale that might not be told. I sprinted after Byron and Eric. It was obvious who was trained by the CIA, KGB, SIS, whatever it was.
I still could barely take everything in. Eric was good then bad then good, though in my opinion, still a double-crossing cheat, who was afraid of commitment. Didn’t he say he was dating Thanh for years? Byron was an undercover agent. I had been right about Thanh all along. Cameron was actually a decent individual. To top that off, Sandra was even meaner than I thought, which I had no idea was possible. Oh, and terrorists had taken over Provo. All in all, it had been a pretty eventful morning.
Tall chain-link fencing surrounded the Provocity towers on all sides. They were spiked on the top. As we veered closer, it seemed impossible to get in, but I was wrong. Byron took the fence in a couple of leaps and scrambled over to the other side, almost losing the side of his shirt on the barbed ends. Eric did likewise. I wasn’t about to be outdone. Taking a deep breath, I jumped and scaled to the top. Metal jutted out from it and caught my capris. I wrestled free, trying to figure out a way to get past this mess.
“Mad!” Byron called out. “Just go back.”
That was the clincher. I used the main pole as a handhold and jumped, ignoring the pain that seared through my hand. I hit the ground and winced, holding my scraped palm up to the light of the moon. The metal had poked it deep. I wiped the blood off on my black shirt.
“Let me see.” Byron was at my side. He unwrapped the bandage from his hand and wrapped it over mine instead. I made a face. We were officially blood brothers now. “The camera’s been disabled.” Byron gave it an assessing glance. “Sandra’s team took out the security system.” Weird. Sandra had a team?
“Where’s the device?” I asked.
He searched the surrounding area. The Provocity tower was essentially a utility building made of brick with about twelve stories to it. Its three roofs were flat and tiered like a fortress. A blackened tower on the highest roof looked suspiciously like Rapunzel’s. The second tower was taller and rose up from the ground next to the building with only a catwalk between it. It said Provocity on the side in big bold letters. A ladder molded to the side went straight to the top. I had to avert my face; it made me too dizzy to look up at it.
“The device is on the top of the Provocity towers.” Byron pointed. “Someone’s been giving the towers a paint job. See the scaffold. The hostiles went in under the cover of painters to get the wiring in.”
Keeping my eyes carefully averted from the high ladder, I stared at the plank where the terrorists had worked. Ropes were rigged to the side of the cage. That’s where we’d have to disable the device. I tried to mentally connect my way up the side of the building with the catwalks and ladders. No matter what, going up would be scary. One false move would prove fatal.
I tried to find an alternate entry through the building. My eyes—trained by months of prank wars—picked out broken windows in the corner of the basement. No one suspected foul play in the relatively quiet little town of Provo…well, quiet where criminals were concerned. There was also a coal shack to the side that could connect us to the building through a basement, and a tall metal door to the warehouse that looked like it led inside to a loading dock of sorts. Getting in would be cake, but I was afraid of what we’d find inside.
Byron firmly pulled me aside. “Mad Dog, you don’t have the training to do this. I need you out here.” I wanted to agree with him, but I couldn’t let Byron go into this by himself, especially with lover boy at his heels.
Eric stopped scanning the length of the towers to give me a considering look. “We can’t leave Mad out here by herself,” he said after a moment.
“We need her as our lookout,” Byron argued impatiently.
“How? Our cell phones don’t work.”
Byron’s eyes were hard on Eric. “Let’s fix that then. If one of us turns off the generators, it’ll lessen the frequency interference so we can use our cell phones. Either way, we’ll stop these guys.” He gave me a measuring look. “If we don’t get through, we’ll need someone to take out the control box from the top of the tower.”
“And who would that be? Mad?” Eric’s face screwed up in anger. “You expect her to scale up the top of that tower on that ladder? That’s suicide.”
Byron licked dry lips, sparing me a glance. “You don’t think she can hack it?”
“I can hack it,” I cut in; pretty sure I was playing into Byron’s trick—but we were wasting valuable time. We had to stop these guys from testing out the device. Already I could hear the creaking and the high-pitched sounds of buzzing from the generators inside.
Byron pressed his hand over mine. For once, his touch didn’t stem from being undercover. My hand tingled slightly, but the look in his eyes did more. There was a tenderness in them that looked familiar; he always looked at me like that. “Thanks cuz,” he said in an undertone. “I need you to be here.”
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