“I want you to get started, Daneel,” Paul told the A.I. “Start researching warfare. There are whole libraries on the subject and it will take you a long time to work through them.”
“What are you going to do, Dad?” the A.I. asked in return.
“I’m going to check on the news for a minute,” Paul replied with a grim smile and a nod. “I want to see how things are going in the Middle East. Maybe there is news on how Mom is doing there.”
“Okay, Dad. Uh, Dad?” he paused, looking a bit embarrassed. “Thanks. I love you.”
Paul nodded in appreciation and smiled. “And I love you too, son.”
For several moments, Paul sat unmoving in his chair, thinking about what Daneel had just told him. The machine was more human than a great many people he knew. Small surprise then that he seemed to have all the emotional makeup of any normal human being, including the emotion of love. In copying his own mental patterns, Paul had achieved a far greater reproduction than he had ever considered possible. What an outstanding achievement it was, a tribute to what was now possible with the amalgamation of magical powers and technology. Who knew what else could be achieved with such tools?
He noticed that Daneel was no longer playing video games but surfing the internet. The A.I.—no, the young man was simply amazing.
Paul waved a hand, bringing forth an internet display, pulling up the Reuters News Agency. Two dignified talking heads were making assertive hand gestures with great emphasis and excitedly debating something.
“…fast, even for the Israeli Defense Forces!” said one of them adamantly. “They plowed right through the border defenses—”
The other individual, a middle-aged woman that Paul didn’t recognize, was shaking her head. “Political risk, I say, for the Prime Minister to take that action. The international community—“
It was the man’s turn to shake his head. “The children! Two of them dead! He took a risk if he didn’t invade—”
With a growing sense of alarm, Paul switched feeds to a BBC website. There a reporter stood in front of the camera, microphone in hand, while in the background the occasional firing of mortars could be heard.
“…earlier this morning,” he was saying. “Again, the latest word we have is that they are twenty kilometers over the border, closing in on a small Syrian town, the alleged location of the kidnappers of the Israeli bus children. Reports of more deaths of the kidnapped children are unsubstantiated at this time! But sources—”
Paul shut off the display. Something was terribly wrong!
“Merlin!” he growled, standing and putting hands to hips in frustration.
Merlin materialized in midair, dressed in thick pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, hiking boots and an Alpen Schatz hat. Draped around his neck and one shoulder was a thick yellow coil of heavy climbing rope, ending in a three pronged grabbling hook, which he held in one hand. Strapped to his waist was a belt carrying a Petzl bongo hammer, a string of rocklock carabineers and a bag each of anchors and pitons.
“What’s up now?” the sorcerer asked with a hint of impatience. “I’m a little busy.”
“There’s a problem,” Paul told him in a shaky voice, ignoring the mountain climbing gear. ”Capie left for the Middle East hours ago. She should have arrived there already.”
Merlin floated down to the ground. “And?”
“So, there’s fighting there now! The Israeli Army has invaded Syria! Some of the Israeli children that Capie went to save have reportedly been killed! Merlin, if she were there, doing what she went to do, then none of that would have happened! Unless…” And Paul found that he suddenly couldn’t complete the sentence, his throat constricted, his mouth dry.
“Steady there, young man,” the wizard from the Middle Ages said, with a nod of his head. “To be sure, there is cause for concern but you know not what has happened.”
Paul frowned, looking down at the ground. “Capie’s in trouble. I just know it.”
With a sudden lunge, he grabbed the satellite phone and madly punched in the buttons, fumbling when he made a mistake but finally getting it right on the third try.
“Dad?” Daneel asked, a look of growing concern on his young face. “Is there something wrong with Mom?”
Paul tried to smile reassuringly but failed. “I don’t think so,” he responded, unconvincingly, holding the satellite phone up to one ear.
There was no answer.
“You’re going after her, I hope,” mumbled Merlin.
“Dad, are we going to find Mom?” Daneel asked, frowning with worry.
“Yes, Daneel, that’s exactly what we are going to do. Come on, Merlin. Get rid of the climbing gear. I’m not even going to stop to pack. We’ve got to get there just as fast as we can!”
TWENTY
Israeli Northern Command Headquarters
Safed, Israel
September
Friday 1:14 p.m. IDT
Hurling himself rapidly, portal by portal, across the Indian Ocean and then across Saudi Arabia and then Jordan with both Merlin and Daneel in tow the whole way, Paul arrived in Safed, Israel shortly after one p.m. local time. Along the way, he had tried calling Capie several times on the satellite phone. There had been no answer.
Immediately upon his arrival in Safed, he first tried a scan of the local area, searching for the embedded gram of platinum 190 that had been implanted underneath Capie’s skin between her shoulder blades. He ran the scan out to a radius of 100 miles in all directions.
Nothing.
Disconcerted, he ran it again, out to 500 miles.
Still nothing.
According to their tests, he should have been able to detect the platinum 190 anywhere within a maximum radius of 800 miles. So he ran the scan again, to the maximum range he could reach.
But nothing turned up on his scan. She wasn’t anywhere in the range that he could reach.
For a full minute, he stood there in shock and incredulity. She wasn’t within 800 miles of Safed?! That meant that she not only wasn’t in Israel or Syria but she was also not in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt, Georgia, or the northern half of Saudi Arabia!
Where in the name of all that was holy could she be?!
“Dad?” Daneel asked plaintively. “Where’s Mom?”
That was a really great question. Even if she were unconscious or even…dead…he should still have been able to find the platinum 190. So, where was she?
For a moment, he considered the idea of starting a standard search pattern, spiraling outward in 800 mile increments from his current location. He could theoretically search the entire surface of the planet in, oh, say, a month or so.
Bad idea, that. No telling what wizards of Errabêlu he might run into that way.
“I don’t know, son,” he replied. “Let’s go ask if anyone has seen her here.”
Lacking any good alternatives, Paul went to the command headquarters for the Israeli Defense Force, Northern Command, which, according to the internet was responsible for defending the entire northern end of Israel from attacks from either Lebanon or Syria. His intent was to find the commanding officer and interview an avatar of the man.
But Major General Moshe Peretz was not there. According to the avatar of one of the soldiers, the general had personally gone with elements of the 91st Division into Syria to rescue the kidnapped children and was, at that particular moment in time, in the city of Nawa, a dozen miles across the Syrian border.
Another try on the cell phone was not answered.
“Dad, where is Mom?” Daneel asked, tears forming down his face.
“We’ll find her, son. But we need to hurry,” Paul muttered.
“She’s fine,” Merlin said, attempting to comfort the youngster.
“Come on,” Paul muttered, opening a new portal.
Racing into Syria, they arrived at Nawa to find that combat operations had already ceased and that the IDF Sword Battalion was withdrawing and already halfway back up the 119 high
way toward the Golan Heights.
Going back down the road himself, Paul had no difficulty in finding the general. He stood beside a mobile command post in the small town of Keshet. While the man was busy coordinating the withdrawal with his staff, Paul found a nearby empty house that afforded a modicum of privacy and created an avatar of the general in the small living room.
“General Peretz, did you rescue the children?”
“Most of them, yes,” the avatar answered in Hebrew. “Four were killed by terrorists and two during the rescue. The rest are alive and are being evac’d to the Rivka Ziv Medical Center in Safed.”
Some of the children killed? Surely, if Capie had been there, that wouldn’t have happened. So where was she?
“And was there any sign of a red-headed American woman?”
“Such a person talked to me, before the battle, in the same fashion as you are now,” the image told Paul. “I have not seen her since nor has anyone reported seeing her.”
“Daddy?” wailed Daneel.
“Hush, little one,” Merlin appealed to the young man. “It will work out. Daddy will find her.”
Paul paced back and forth, uncertain of what to do next. The one thing that he was sure of was that the Israeli general couldn’t be of any further help to him.
“Let’s go talk to the bad guys next,” he said, wringing his hands.
• • • •
The avatar of a Syrian soldier in Nawa directed Paul to the area headquarters of the Syrian army in Jasim. There Paul found that the local commanding officer was a certain Colonel Sayid Mussan directing his forces from a Senezh-M1E HLCP (High Level Command Post) parked near a small school.
On the roof of a nearby second story apartment building, Paul created an avatar of the Syrian Colonel.
“Whose idea was it to kidnap a bus load of Israeli children?” he snapped at the image.
“Orders from Damascus,” the figure responded. “I don’t know who, but from fairly high up in the government.”
“Did you see or talk to a red-headed American woman?”
“Yes,” it said and Paul leaned forward, his eyes blazing.
“When? Where?” he demanded to know.
“In Nawa. We were told that she would come, to try to rescue our hostages. When she was seen, the Regional Head of Military Intelligence, Major General Yousef Anawi, was to be told, personally. The Mukhbarat, the secret police, moved in. There was much confusion then. I was there. I saw things I did not understand. I was ordered not to talk about it.”
Paul stood there, speechless, mouth open, stunned into disbelief. The Syrians had taken those kids as hostages in order to take Capie? How was that possible?
It made no sense to him. How could they know anything about her? All of the terrorists involved in the Olympic Games terrorist attack were dead. So how would they know that she would come, that she had red hair? How did they know that?
This man wouldn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Only the members of Errabêlu in Syria would know that.
Daneel was crying louder now, Merlin doing his best to comfort the boy.
“Where did they take her?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know,” the avatar admitted. “I saw a circle of light appear. She was unconscious, I think. Two Mukhbarat carried her through the circle and disappeared. That’s all I saw. I was told several times not to talk about it.”
There were mysteries here that puzzled Paul deeply. However, now was not the time to reflect on such abstract thoughts. His missing wife was the primary concern.
His engineer training kicked in. What options did he have? The scan for the platinum 190 had not worked.
The satellite phone, of course.
Swiftly creating an internet display, he started sifting through the websites. Yes, it could be done. Satellite phones could be tracked, similar in fashion to tracking cell phones. As long as they were turned on.
Activating the appropriate website, he typed in the number, initiating a search…
But the result came back negative. The phone was obviously turned off.
TWENTY-ONE
El Kheir Restaurant
Hannan Street
Haifa, Israel
September
Friday 6:07 p.m. AWST
For hours he struggled with some solution to the problem. He consulted with both Merlin and Uncle Sam without figuring out a way to track Capie’s whereabouts.
A part of him wanted to charge straight into Damascus and corner the wizard there, demanding answers. And he wouldn’t hesitate to use any amount of force that it took to get those answers too.
Daneel was the reason he couldn’t do it. Confronting an Errabêlu wizard was very high risk. If it had only been himself to think about, he would have done it. But he couldn’t expose Daneel to that too. Moreover, there was still the matter of all the Normals of Earth. They were in jeopardy too, in the long run, if he failed to stop Errabêlu eventually. Several times he tried the internet again. And always the same result. The phone was not on and could not be tracked.
For lack of anything better to do and because he was getting hungry, he went by portal to the El Kheir Restaurant in Haifa and sat in a corner booth. Part of him noticed how delicious the food was, but mostly he ate in a mechanical fashion. Afterward, he couldn’t even remember what he had eaten.
He sat there, staring at the wall, feeling numb. In the automaton’s monitor, Daneel watched his father somberly without saying a word.
And then the satellite phone rang.
It rang twice while Paul sat there blinking in stunned amazement, not daring to believe that it really was ringing. There was only one other person who knew that number.
Slowly, he picked it up and answered it.
“PAUL!” screamed Capie’s voice. “Paul, can you hear me? PAUL?! Oh, God, please help me! PAUL! They are almost HERE!”
“Capie!” Paul yelled at the top of his lungs, alarming every other person in the restaurant. “I can hear you! Where are you? What’s wrong?”
There was another agonizing scream, this time of pure pain.
Without warning, the phone hung up.
“CAPIE!” Paul shrieked at the top of his lungs, an utter sense of panic threatening to rip him apart. He hurriedly paid his bill and left the establishment, Daneel and Merlin in tow.
Outside, Paul skittered back and forth along the street, glancing this way and that.
“Calm thyself,” Merlin implored him in a loud voice. “You do Capie no good in this state.”
“Dad! What happened, Dad? Was that Mom on the phone?” Daneel begged to know.
Paul came to a sudden halt, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes, Merlin, you are right. I must not panic. I must think instead.”
He turned to face Daneel, steeling himself for what he had to say. “Son, something is bad wrong with Mom. She said ‘they’re almost here.’”
“Then they might have killed her,” Daneel despondently muttered. “Like her father.”
With a lump in Paul’s throat and his eyes on the verge of tears, he nodded. “Yes, it is possible,” he barely managed to say. “But this is not making sense. According to the Syrian Colonel, she had already been kidnapped. Maybe she briefly escaped. Or she was able to get to a phone for a minute.”
“Or this is a trap,” Merlin added, realistically.
Paul nodded. “Yes, there is that possibility too. But I think they will want to keep her alive for a while. She will be a complete mystery to them. They will want to know who she is, where she came from and how she got her powers.”
“They will want to know where you are too,” Daneel logically pointed out.
“Yes, well, it’s possible that she may already have told them that. But even if she tells them I am in Australia, they may not believe her. They will want to confirm it.”
“Then they likely will torture her,” Daneel concluded, as he began to softly cry.
“Where was she calling from?�
�� Merlin prodded him.
“Excellent question and the first one I should have thought of. Thanks, Merlin.” Without regard to the strange looks of the pedestrians walking by, Paul created an internet display on the side of a block building and initiated the satellite phone search yet again. This time, he got a positive response, including the latitude and longitude.
“All right!” he shouted, pumping a fist in the air with hysterical relief. “Now, where is that?” Google maps quickly told him that it was in Eastern Europe, in Romania.
“Europe?” echoed a very surprised Paul. “What is she doing in Europe?”
“We don’t know how long she will be there,” Merlin prompted.
“Right,” Paul nodded, with another deep breath. “We must act fast, yes. But in case it is some sort of trap, we must act smart too.” He glanced around again. “We need a workbench and a few tools.”
• • • •
From an Ace Hardware store on the east side of the city, Paul purchased a soldering iron, solder, wire cutters, and all the USB adapter cables they had in stock.
In an open pasture at the nearby Carmel Mountain National Park, he set up a virtual reality work bench and, like a house a-fire, began cutting and stripping wires. He also took one of the Oni talisman armbands off and laid it on the bench as well.
“Dad! What are you doing?” Daneel pleaded to know, angst in every word.
“Yes,” Merlin echoed, as he floated closer in the late afternoon sunlight to get a better look at what Paul was working on. “I hope you don’t mind. But I would like to know too! What are you up to?”
“They have her,” Paul explained in a rush. “It’s going to be hard for me to just bust in and rescue her. Even eight Oni talismans probably aren’t enough to let me get away with that. It’s quite likely, maybe even probable, that they know about me. But the good news is that they don’t know about you, son.”
“Me! What can I do?” Daneel exclaimed hopefully.
“Why do you need Daneel?” Merlin asked.
Paul waited a moment before answering. “I may need the help of another wizard. It would more than double our chances of pulling off a rescue. I can create a distraction while a Scottie does an end run.”
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 25