by Jack Soren
“Is that wise?” Emily said, coming back into the room. She had a T-shirt in her hands. “Found this under one of the pillows.”
“Too late to matter,” Lew said, holding up the empty bottle before he dropped it in the bag with the others. He took Jonathan’s shirt and tossed it in his bag. “I think we’re good to go.”
They grabbed everything and left the room. Lew dumped their garbage and noticed a newspaper in the receptacle. He took it out and flipped through it.
“Weird,” Lew said.
“What is?” Emily asked as they waited for the elevator.
“There’s nothing in here about Jonny.”
“Maybe it’s old.”
“Nope, it’s got a bunch of stuff about the explosion and The Monarch, but no mention of Jonny being identified as him.”
“What’s it mean?” Emily asked.
“I’m not sure. But if I went to all that trouble to identify someone so I could kidnap them, it would sure help if no one else was suddenly looking for him.”
Emily looked at him in that weird way again, like when someone spent hours looking at one of those magic posters and finally saw the sailboat raise itself up off the page. He didn’t like it. It made his throat dry.
The elevator bell rang and the door opened. They entered the car and both reached for the ground button at the same time. A half turn each and their faces were only a few inches apart. He could smell her scent; not perfume or cologne, but just a coppery, unique smell that was all hers. She held his gaze a few moments too long, her lips parting just slightly.
“Sorry,” he finally said, clearing his throat and stepping back to give her room to press the button. She pressed it and the door slid shut. They rode down in silence, each staring at the floor, the air in the car seeming thicker than it had on the way up.
They were headed back to the scene of the crime—Federal Plaza.
While Lew had policed the hotel room, Emily had called Donald Hinton, a junior FBI agent she’d met while preparing for the press conference and one of the few agency people she knew was still alive. She found out he was going to be bringing evidence on the case from Federal Plaza to the temporary FBI HQ in Lower Manhattan. Including the tracking phone. As much as Lew hated the idea of going back there, if they could get close enough with their Bluetooth hack device, Hinton wouldn’t even know what had happened.
It was a long shot, but it was all they had. If it didn’t work, Lew knew he’d never see Jonathan again.
35
Tartaruga Island
8:00 A.M. Local Time
“I WANT TO see my daughter,” Jonathan said, holding fast. The guards walking behind him stopped and raised their weapons. Nathan swung his wheelchair around. Jonathan made a conscious effort to not appear threatening—he just wasn’t moving until he talked to Natalie. Maybe that wasn’t even she. She’d been so far away and blindfolded, it could have been any little girl. Yet his rationalizations didn’t hold much water when he considered the phone call.
“In due time. Please, let’s continue. It’s so infrequent lately that I have guests I can show around,” Nathan said. Jonathan evaluated his “host.” It was disconcerting to talk to someone when his lips didn’t move. And with the way his head lolled to the side, it wasn’t even possible to look him in the eye most of the time.
“Move,” Lara said.
“Did you kill the Swensons?” Jonathan asked.
“Who?” Nathan said.
“The family that was looking after his daughter,” Lara said.
“Ah,” Nathan said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Lara that.”
Jonathan looked at Lara, who was apparently the old man’s daughter, and waited.
The smart play would be to shut up and keep walking. He was being given an opportunity to reconnoiter the enemy’s lair, by the enemy himself, no less. But when it came to Natalie, he was rarely logical. Like the outburst when they’d shown her to him, it was raw emotion; no filter and no thought. If he’d been unbound and close enough, he actually would have killed them. With his bare hands, if necessary. Death was no stranger to him, but Jonathan had never killed or harmed anyone in anger in his life. But right now if he knew where Natalie was he’d dump this old, used-up pile of flesh onto the floor and beat him to a pulp with his own wheelchair.
“Lara?” Nathan prompted. She continued her staring contest with Jonathan for a while longer.
“They’re fine,” she said. “A little . . . bruised, but fine.” She grinned beneath her hooded gaze.
Well, that’s something, Jonathan thought. He was carrying enough guilt right now. Assuming she was telling the truth.
“Now for the last time, move,” Lara said, squaring off.
When Jonathan didn’t comply, Lara nodded her head. One of the guards snapped out a telescoping club and swung it into the backs of his legs. Jonathan kept the scream in, but his muscles betrayed him and he fell to his knees.
“Lara!” the old man said in what passed for a shout from the electronic voice mounted to his wheelchair. He swung around to face the guards. “Leave us.”
At first they didn’t move. Jonathan looked up and though the old man missed it, the guards only obeyed the command when Lara nodded again.
“My apologies. My daughter can be . . . impulsive. Lara, help the poor man up,” Nathan said. Lara grudgingly took Jonathan by the arm and helped him stand. Jonathan took note of her stance as she did. She appeared to be helping him, but she positioned herself so she could knock him back down with a single blow.
“Thanks,” Jonathan said, looking into her green eyes. He made sure nothing that was going on inside his head was evident on his face. She sneered anyway, releasing him and returning to her father’s side.
“I promise you, your daughter is safe and close by. You’ll see her shortly. And later, I have something very special to show you. Something you will uniquely appreciate,” Nathan said.
They continued the tour, Jonathan limping slightly from the welt he could feel rising on the back of his leg. Lara positioned herself so she was always within striking distance of Jonathan.
“As I was saying,” Nathan said. “My father bought the island from the Australian military after the war. The base was used for intelligence gathering by Z Force, a joint—”
“—Australian, British, and New Zealand commando unit,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, I see you know your military history. In any case, once Z Force moved out, there was little left besides this complex, a few remote stations around the island stripped of equipment, and one of the few island runways in the region capable of supporting jet traffic. That and about a million turtles. I wasn’t sure why he bought it, but I know he thrust himself immediately into controversy by stripping the island of the turtles. The act was being brought to the world’s attention and things looked bad until the U.S. military did the same on Diego Garcia off the coast of India. But in U.S. fashion, they upped the ante and instead of depopulating turtles, they stripped the island of all indigenous humans.”
“How fortunate for your father,” Jonathan said.
“He was lucky like that. In life and in business. They say he had the Midas touch, turning any enterprise he attempted into a gold-producing venture against all odds. Over and over again. After he died, I used the island mostly as a sanctuary. Somewhere to come and recharge when corporate life got to be a little too much.”
They rounded a bend in the wide corridor and came upon an elevator. Inside, Jonathan saw the complex had four floors in all, but the numbers on the control panel were inverted, with 1 at the top. Right now, they were on the second floor.
We’re underground.
Once they were all inside, the button for the fourth floor lit up all on its own. The doors shut and they descended. When the doors opened, Jonathan saw that most floors, at least the ones
he had seen, had an almost identical layout. Simple, utilitarian efficiency common in the military. But the floors were huge, with crisscrossing corridors. If he could get free, finding Natalie would be no small feat—never mind getting out of there once he did.
“We’re not going to the third floor?” Jonathan asked. The omission of the area made him curious. Lara gave a side glance to her father but remained silent.
“It’s just the living areas. Nothing of much interest,” Nathan said. They moved around the corner and headed down the now familiar long corridor at a slow pace. “When I became ill, I moved my corporate headquarters here. It was supposed to be temporary, but once I’m well I think I may keep it here.”
“Once you’re well?” Jonathan said. He couldn’t believe that someone who looked like Nathan did would ever be well again. He looked like he needed to be in hospice so he could prepare to die. “If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly do you—”
“Ah, we’re here,” Nathan said as they turned the far corner in the corridor. They had arrived at a door with an access panel. Unlike the other hallways and rooms, this door didn’t open automatically as they approached. A guard stood vigil outside the door, straightening up when he saw them approaching.
“Lara, if you’d be so kind,” Nathan said. Lara took out a pass card and after two tries, unlocked the door. They went in and Jonathan saw it was a laboratory of some kind. The layout and equipment didn’t interest Jonathan as much as the stunning woman in the lab coat with the black ponytail, at the far end of the lab.
Nathan brought his wheelchair to a stop and said, “Mr. Hall, I’d like you to meet my other daughter, Sophia. She’s the scholar of the family.” Jonathan noticed that Lara sneered as much at her sister as she did at him.
Sophia came over. She had the saddest brown eyes he’d ever seen. But not just sad, they seemed almost—broken. Maybe that explains the guard outside the door. She gave Jonathan a half smile.
“No problems with the neuro-blocker?” Sophia asked, not really seeming to care one way or the other.
“It’s working fine, as usual. I was hoping you could keep Mr. Hall company for a little while. I need to speak to Lara on another matter,” Nathan said. Jonathan noticed Lara’s eyes widen slightly. Sophia reached up and pushed an escaping strand of hair behind her ear. It immediately fell down again. He didn’t know about Nathan’s plans to use him to rob Canton George, but right now he was pretty sure Nathan was using him as a lever between the two sisters.
“Father, do you think that’s wise?” Lara said.
Sophia said, “I don’t know. I’m busy with some animal trials and—”
“Nonsense. It will only be for a few minutes. Think of it as a break,” Nathan said, turning around and wheeling his way back to the door. “Lara?”
Lara’s face went from a sneer to a pucker as she exchanged glances first with Sophia and then with Jonathan. He didn’t know what Sophia’s said, but he understood the look she gave him perfectly. Lara puffed air from her nostrils and reluctantly joined her father, opening the door and following him as he whirred away. As the door closed, Jonathan saw there were now two guards standing fast outside the lab.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
9:00 A.M.
WHAT ARE YOU doing?
Sophia brushed through her hair and pulled it back into a strand-free ponytail, snapping the hair band tight to keep it that way. Her freshly rinsed face now had a light powder coating it hadn’t had when she’d first come in. She’d rolled fresh deodorant under her arms, but refrained from squirting the little perfume she had left on her neck. She put her lab coat back on, smoothing out any wrinkles with her hands and plucking off the odd animal hair she’d missed with the lint roller. She looked at herself in the mirror of her lab’s bathroom and then made a face at the perturbed reflection.
She’d left him out in the lab, saying she’d be back in a minute. Her father—she desperately wanted to think of him as only Nathan, but after all these years it was hard—probably would be upset that she’d left him alone.
But why did he leave him here with me in the first place? Especially after last night.
Sophia opened the door but stopped short when she saw Jonathan standing in her office by her desk. She eyed her unmade cot against the wall and her pile of clothes on the floor. He turned and smiled disarmingly when she entered.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Would it be all right if I . . .” He motioned toward the bathroom.
“Of course. Go ahead,” Sophia said. The second he closed the door, she scooped up her laundry and tossed it under the cot. She pulled the blanket up and saw there was a salsa stain on it from the burrito she’d had last night. She put her pillow on top of the stain and shook her head. Of all nights to be a slob.
The door opened and she stood up so fast her glasses fell off. She bent to get them, but Jonathan beat her to them. He smiled and handed them to her.
“Should we go back out?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes. Sure,” Sophia said. Jonathan motioned for her to go first. She thanked him and left her office with Jonathan close behind.
“How do you know my father, Mr. Hall?” Sophia asked when they were back in the lab. He seemed more interested in her animal cages than in her. He answered without turning around.
“I don’t. And call me Jonathan.”
“You—”
“So what is all this about?” Jonathan asked, waving at the cages and the maze table.
“It’s for my research.”
“This whole lab is just for you?”
“I used to have a staff. In fact, most of the initial work was done at Kring Laboratories, a research facility in Nigeria, but things . . . changed.”
“I’m assuming the change has something to do with the guard outside your door. He’s not keeping people out, is he.” It wasn’t a question.
Who is this guy?
“If you don’t know my father, then how—”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
“Excuse me?” Sophia said, feeling her face redden.
“Give me the Cliff Notes version of your research and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Deal?” he asked, putting out his hand.
Sophia shook it and agreed, noticing how soft his hand was. She doubted revealing the research to a stranger was what her father had in mind when he asked her to stay with Jonathan. Which was exactly why she agreed so quickly.
“Do you know what a prion is?” she asked, wiping off a whiteboard and grabbing a marker.
“Something to do with the brain, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right. Basically,” she said, drawing something that resembled a string on the board, “there are harmless proteins in all of us—you, me, animals, plants—everything. For these proteins to assume a functional shape—be able to do anything—they have to fold, sort of like this.”
Sophia drew a kind of coiled ribbon beside the string, trying her best to simplify the process for Jonathan. He nodded, so she assumed she was doing all right.
“For some reason—nobody really knows why—sometimes one of these benign proteins will fold abnormally,” she said, continuing to draw. “But the really interesting part—and the real danger—is not that a protein can fold, but what an abnormally folded protein does after it folds. They’re capable of coopting any other proteins they come in contact with, making it a copy of itself.”
“Like a zombie,” Jonathan said as Sophia finished drawing something that looked like an untied shoelace.
“Exactly, but a microscopic zombie that will never get a movie deal. It travels through the body, changing perfectly healthy proteins into copies of itself. When these misfolded prions get into the nervous system and the brain, you get prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal insomnia
, and even some types of Alzheimer’s.”
“You can die from insomnia?”
“Um, yes, but it’s not the kind of insomnia you’re probably thinking of. Only twenty-eight families in the world have been identified with the gene responsible for—but I’m getting off topic,” she said, batting the air like she was erasing what she just said.
“Sorry. Prions. You were saying,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, someone with a prion disease experiences impaired brain function causing memory changes, personality changes, dementia, and problems with movement. All of these get worse over time,” she said, putting down the marker and walking over to where the cages lined the wall.
“Is that what your father has?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes, he has kuru, a type of prion disease that used to be quite prevalent in New Guinea back in the 1970s.”
“The seventies? How long has he known he had it?” Jonathan asked.
“He was diagnosed shortly after returning from New Guinea around 1973. Even though they could detect it in his blood, kuru has a long incubation period before symptoms start to show up. Decades,” she said. She left out the part about that being the same year she was born—partly because with her recent revelations, she wasn’t all that sure about the veracity of what she’d always assumed were facts about her early childhood. And partly because she wasn’t that crazy about admitting to Jonathan that she was over forty.
“Wait a minute. Kuru. Kuru. Why do I know that name?” Jonathan asked, but he didn’t appear to be asking her. Then it seemed to come to him. “Kuru. I think I played a video game that had kuru in the backstory a year or two ago. In fact, I think it was set near Papua New Guinea. But they must have embellished. It was a zombie game. The characters only turned when they—”
Jonathan stopped mid-sentence. Sophia was pretty sure it was because of the look on her face. Even with her connection to Nathan being fictional, she was mortified at the idea of the truth coming out. But she knew the best thing she could do was face it head-on.