by Graham Brown
“You have no authority here,” Dr. Vasquez said bluntly.
“No, we don’t. But our superiors are in touch with important members of your government.” Danielle had no choice but to lie. “People who both know of and have approved of our presence. I don’t have the time or the ability to contact them now. So please, just help us. Then we’ll go.”
Dr. Vasquez seemed torn. She looked at Yuri again. How could she not help? “We can do an MRI,” she said. “And after that you leave.”
Danielle nodded, thinking she would promise anything to get Yuri the examination he needed.
* * *
Professor McCarter sat in a public plaza, hiding among a crowd of people and the chaos of a traffic jam caused by the midafternoon blackout.
He tried to concentrate on the surroundings, looking for any sign of trouble, struggling against the flight reflex building within him.
In his backpack he carried the newly found stone, an object that had just discharged a massive burst of electromagnetic energy, an object that at least two groups of armed men were looking for and willing to kill over. As uneasy as he felt carrying it around undefended, both he and Danielle realized it would be unconscionable to bring it into the hospital, where it could interfere with countless tests and devices, not the least of which were the items needed to examine Yuri.
Across from him a fountain rose in concrete and stucco. Hundreds of people milled around, many of them out on the street and in the park because of the blackout. In an open area a group of teenagers was playing soccer. Near the borders of their makeshift field stood a group of uniformed federales. They walked through the mass of people looking like predators among a herd of prey.
Logic told him they were there for crowd control, to make sure an afternoon blackout didn’t turn into something worse. But despite his well-founded logic, he couldn’t shake the thought that they were specifically looking for him. Coming to find him and to take the stone.
* * *
Danielle stood with Dr. Vasquez in the control room studying the MRI. It showed a cross section of Yuri’s brain, highlighted in red, orange, and pink. One section was blue and it was blurred.
“What is that?” she asked.
The doctor adjusted the controls and had the machine run another scan. The beltlike apparatus that Yuri laid on moved him back into the tube of the massive machine and a series of loud clunking noises were heard as the machine took another picture of Yuri’s brain.
This one was slightly better, but still blurred around the blue section.
“Could something be wrong with the imager?” Danielle asked.
Dr. Vasquez shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I changed the angle of the scan slightly, just to be sure.” She pointed to the blurred area. “If it were the machine, the blurred area would have appeared to move. It didn’t. It’s in a different place on the image, the same spot in the child’s brain.”
“What is it?” Danielle asked.
“You said someone was doing experiments on him?”
“To the best of my knowledge that’s true.”
Dr. Vasquez nodded sadly. “In that case I would guess that we’re looking at the remnants of one of those experiments,” she said. “That is an object, a powered object, inserted into his cerebral cortex.”
“A powered object?”
“It’s emitting its own electromagnetic wave,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Minor, to be sure, but that’s the blue distortion.”
Danielle felt sick to her stomach. And then she heard a sound that made it worse. Yuri had woken up and had begun to scream.
* * *
McCarter moved toward the outskirts of the park. He had stopped at the table of a street vendor and pretended to examine some of his offerings. He glanced back toward the group of policemen.
They’re coming for the stone.
Were they his thoughts or a voice?
Run. It was an urging, not a physical sound. Run!
McCarter couldn’t help it. He dropped the trinket from his hand and ran for the street.
* * *
Yuri had awoken screaming but had calmed down as soon as the MRI machine was shut down. He clung to Danielle as Dr. Vasquez did a number of other tests.
“There’s no sign of swelling to his brain,” she said. “His neurological responses are good.”
Thank God, Danielle thought.
“What about the blood from his ear?”
“It looks as if he had a cyst inside his ear canal that ruptured during the seizure,” she said. “But he can hear okay. So, no damage.”
The doctor smiled. “He’s a lucky child,” she said, then seemed to realize better. “In some ways.”
Danielle stood, holding Yuri protectively.
“What will you do with him now?” Dr. Vasquez asked.
“Try to get him to somewhere safe, where he can receive help,” she said.
“You could leave him with us,” she said. “I’ll make sure he’s cared for.”
Danielle hesitated. There was an undeniable attraction to the idea. Let Yuri disappear, no Kang, no Russia. No more problems for him. But she couldn’t be sure it would turn out that way.
She shook her head. “There are people looking for him, people you won’t be able to protect him from. If they found you, they would kill you and anyone who stood in their way.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story,” Danielle said. “When we leave, you should call the police. In case these men come here.”
The doctor nodded, looking nervous. She glanced at Hawker still holding the gun. “I’ll give you five minutes before I call. Don’t come back.”
Danielle turned and left the room carrying Yuri. Hawker followed a second later.
“Should I call security?” Ricardo asked.
“No,” Dr. Vasquez replied.
“You’re going to let them go?”
She nodded. “I think it’s best,” she said. “If they are who they say they are, then there is no need getting mixed up in the situation.”
“And if they’re not?”
“Better they be far from here when the police find them,” she said.
Ricardo nodded reluctantly and then looked past her to a small device beside the door. A bright green LED was flashing rapidly.
“Was the intrusion in the child’s head radioactive?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Why?”
He pointed to the LED. “The waste alarm. One of them has been exposed to radioactive materials.”
* * *
McCarter tried to run in a controlled fashion, but he knew it must have looked bad. His leg was hurting and his mind was spinning, and he reckoned his pace was that of a man in a three-legged race, even if he was tied to no one but himself.
He continued across the street, thinking he had to get away, away from the police, away from whoever was chasing him, away from Hawker and Danielle.
The last thought hit him hard. Why had he thought that? They were his friends; they were protecting him. Was his subconscious mind trying to tell him something?
He saw a bus stop in front of the hospital and a city bus coming down the crowded street. He ran over and got in line. The bus slowed, releasing a great blast of air from its brakes.
“Professor?”
He turned to see Danielle and Hawker coming out of the hospital. Yuri was walking with them. He was thankful for that.
“What are you doing?” Danielle asked suspiciously.
His mind raced. “Ahh, I’m hiding,” he said. “Trying to look inconspicuous.”
He gestured at the police, both in the park and on the street corner.
“The police aren’t after us,” Danielle noted.
“Can’t be too sure,” he said defensively.
Danielle looked at Hawker, then nodded toward the bus. “What do you think?”
“Time to let the old jeep go,” he said, agreeing.
“We’r
e getting on?” McCarter asked, surprised.
“Yeah,” Danielle said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 36
Arnold Moore sat in the permanent darkness of the Yucca Mountain tunnel holding a cold compress to his temple while technicians buzzed around him, connecting cables and moving equipment, turning a double-wide trailer into their new laboratory.
He watched them work, fighting the urge to throw up as he had every ten to fifteen minutes since the incident and listening to Byron Stecker bitch so extensively that he’d actually begun looking forward to the next episode of vomiting.
With the first of the lab’s flat-screen monitors now operating, a review of the energy discharge event had been arranged, but there wasn’t much to see.
Moore stared at the screen. The playback, which was now frozen, had been paused with a line of distortion running through the left side of the frame.
It showed the pockmarked desert floor, the smoking eighteen-wheeler, and the Humvees scattered about randomly. It also took in the two Black Hawk helicopters that had crash-landed on separate sections of the route. One seemed to have come down almost normally, but the other was smoking and crumbled over on one side, its rotor blades in dark pieces all around, shattered like old LP records.
In the freeze-frame image, the shape of a man could be seen jumping from the burning hulk.
Byron Stecker, who had been waiting at Yucca for Moore to arrive, spoke. “We have no video depicting the actual event. Nothing prior to this. Despite the fact that there are cameras all over the base — including cameras designed to catch nuclear blasts — all the data feeds are blank from a moment four minutes and nineteen seconds prior to the blast until this point approximately one minute and thirty seconds after.
“But we have one eyewitness describing it as a shock wave rolling across the desert floor, a nuclear blast with everything but the mushroom cloud.”
Moore stared at the display. He’d been unconscious until several minutes later.
“At least fifteen commercial airliners were affected,” Stecker said, “including nine that lost complete electrical power and had to make emergency landings. Nellis radar and communications went down and we have extensive grid failures all along the West Coast. Vegas, Henderson, and Tahoe are completely blacked out.”
Moore tried to ignore it.
“And worst of all,” Stecker added, “both the Russians and Chinese are accusing us of breaking the test ban treaty or of creating some new superweapon. The UN is even convening a Security Council meeting on it the day after tomorrow. And it’s the damned weekend.”
Moore rubbed his head. The interest of the foreign powers certainly complicated things.
“What’s your point?” he asked, too exhausted to wait for the DCI to get around to it.
“I’ve been telling you,” Stecker said, annoyed. “This thing is dangerous.”
“Anything that has power can be dangerous,” Moore said. “A car, a gun, a bomb. Even you. The question is how you use these things and negate the dangers.”
“That’s just the point, Arnold. We don’t know how to use this thing. We don’t even know what it does. All we know is that after two years of studying it you got caught with your pants down.”
No doubt Stecker had already commissioned similar findings and sent them to the president. Moore would have to get off a response quickly and hope that the president could remain rational in the face of such a strong attack.
In the meantime, the scientific effort would kick into high gear. New equipment would be flown out to replace what had been lost in the blast and the new power-sharing arrangement would be tested.
The door to the trailer opened. An air force major came in leading three civilians. The men were scientists: Moore’s own chief analyst, who had fortunately or unfortunately not been on the truck; the CIA’s chosen expert, a stern-faced true believer of about forty-five who had apparently worked on some advanced projects for the military; and an older Native American man in his late fifties. He had tanned, wrinkled skin, thin white hair, and a billy goat’s tuft of scraggly whiskers on his chin. He wore a bolo tie, a plaid cowboy shirt with rhinestone buttons, and an oversized pocket protector stuffed full of pens. Moore recognized him as Nathanial Ahiga, a theoretical physicist who’d once been with the Sandia Labs in New Mexico and now worked for the National Academy of Sciences.
The name Ahiga was Navajo for “the one who fights” and Nathanial’s family had a pedigree in combat. His grandfather had been one of the famed Navajo Code Talkers during World War II, his father had earned medals in Korea, and his older brother had been one of the first Native Americans to join the Green Berets, earning a chest full of commendations during three tours in Vietnam.
Nathanial himself had gone to college instead of joining the military, but his contribution to the armed forces eclipsed them all, since he’d helped design the nuclear triggers used in the warheads on the Trident missile and had spent years after working with the missile-defense effort. If World War III ever did come, Ahiga’s work would be instrumental in both annihilating the enemy and saving what could be protected in the United States.
It was clear from Stecker’s speeches that the CIA wanted the stone destroyed, and Moore and his people already believed that such an action would be a mistake, unless there was truly no other choice.
That dynamic effectively turned Ahiga into the decision maker. When all was said and done, his opinion would be the only one that counted.
Moore shook his hand, then watched as Ahiga strolled around the makeshift lab and over to the viewing station. Leaning in and squinting slightly, he got his first look at the assignment and pursed his lips tightly. It could have been a sign of curiosity, or a simple mannerism the man often used, but to Moore it looked an awful lot like a display of disgust.
CHAPTER 37
Hawker sat on the balcony of their new hotel, a five-star resort fifty miles south of where they had been staying. Like almost everywhere else along the gulf coast of Mexico, this hotel was without electrical power. That had served them well, since the front desk manager had been unable to electronically record their arrival.
A cash bribe had convinced him not to do so even when the lights came back on. An additional payment had put them in this suite and rented the one next door as well. A thousand dollars had been promised for each of the next five days if their presence could be kept secret. That would take them up to the day of reckoning. One way or another, Hawker doubted they’d be around after that.
With no lights on and no moon to speak of, the coast looked as dark as the sea, but out over the blackness of the gulf, a pair of heavy thunderstorms was building, splitting the night with bolts of purple lightning. At times there were long delays between the flashes, but at the moment the show was intense, with flashes illuminating the clouds from inside and handfuls of forked lines spidering across their billowing faces.
Though the storm was tracking inland, the air on the balcony was utterly still. Not the slightest hint of a breeze could be felt and even the flame on the candle beside him burned without a flicker.
To Hawker there was some great truth in the scene, some lesson about life and trouble and how paying attention only to what was immediately around you did not grant a true sense of what was really going on. It was the type of folly that allowed danger to creep in. And he wondered if he was committing such an error himself.
At this moment in time he felt better than he had in years. Not physically, perhaps — the bruising events of the last several hours had left him choosing between ibuprofen and a few stiff drinks — but his mind had grown quiet for the first time in months, if not years. The gnawing sense of guilt, even the dreams of misdeeds in Africa had faded away for now.
He credited the change to being around Danielle and McCarter once again. He wasn’t sure of any greater purpose behind this stone and the prophecy that was linked to it; it all seemed like guesswork to him, but two people he truly cared about were mix
ed up in it and they needed his help. Whatever the outcome might be, protecting his friends brought with it a sense of purpose and peace.
And yet he guessed there were clouds on the horizon somewhere. He couldn’t see them, or feel their effect at this point, but like the storm out over the gulf, he knew they were coming.
In an effort to stave off the thought, he took another drink from the tumbler beside him. As he put the glass down, the door behind him opened and Danielle came out onto the balcony.
“How are the patients?” he asked.
“McCarter’s infection is getting better and he’s working on what we found down there. And believe it or not, Yuri is actually asleep now.”
Hawker’s eyebrows went up.
“I gave him a sedative. He seems to be doing fine.”
“That’s good,” Hawker said, stretching his leg.
Danielle sat down, then reached out and took the glass from him. After a large sip she placed it down on the table between them.
“Any guess as to how they found us?” Hawker asked, giving words to one of the thoughts that had been bothering him.
“They talked to the boat guy,” she said, sounding convinced.
“Okay, and how did they know to talk to the boat guy? How’d they know we would be out on the water?”
“They have the statue from the Island of the Shroud,” she said. “Those were the inscriptions that led McCarter to his discovery.”
“I thought you guys trashed it.” he said.
“We did what we could, but …”
He looked away. It seemed reasonable.
“You concerned?” she asked.
“Always,” he said.
She smiled. “Listen, my suspicious friend, it’s all right. We got the stone, they didn’t catch us, and Yuri’s okay. We’re all okay.”
“Are we?” he said, staring at her.
Hawker had noticed an odd pattern in Danielle, a type of behavior that had not been present in Brazil. When things went to hell, she grew concerned and introspective. And once the danger had passed, the same overly confident attitude returned. It was in her nature to be bold and aggressive, but this seemed like something else, closer to recklessness, as if she was unbalanced in some way.