by Graham Brown
She slumped back into her seat, exhaling. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened down there. I should have been more careful with the mix. Forty percent was too high, considering my situation. It was just a mistake.”
A huge bolt of lightning sliced across the sky. It lit up the horizon and the sea beneath it. Seconds later the faintest sound of thunder reached them. It made him think about the stone.
“What do you think that shock wave was?” he asked.
“The stones create energy,” she said. “Some kind of discharge.”
“Maybe because we moved it,” he said, half joking.
“Maybe,” she said. “The weird thing is, if it didn’t happen when it happened, we’d be dead. We’d have hit the beach and those guys would have shot us in the back before we reached the street.”
Hawker took the glass back. “I call that an extremely fortunate coincidence.”
He took another drink and then refilled the tumbler with two more of the little rum bottles from the minibar.
Danielle seemed to relax a bit. She gazed out toward the storm.
“Why’d you come for me?” she asked quietly.
“Moore paid me to,” he said. “How do you think we can afford this luxurious lifestyle?”
She took the glass from him, had another taste, and held it. “I’m serious. The last time I saw you was two years ago. I promised I’d try to help clear your name, but I couldn’t get anyone to move. And then instead of sending someone to bring you back into the fold, CIA sent some guys to haul you back in chains.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said. “I knew how that would play out. It means a lot that you tried.”
She sighed, took another sip of the rum, and put the glass down. “I didn’t lure McCarter into this,” she said, defensively. “I didn’t want him to be out there alone. I thought I could protect him.”
“I know that, too,” he said. “It sucks to know you can’t protect everyone, no matter how hard you try.”
She nodded as if the words held some deeper meaning. But she didn’t offer it up.
That was too bad, Hawker thought, because here for the first time since they’d known each other she’d begun to show an openness that he found endearing.
“So that’s why you came to get me,” she said, smiling. “To protect someone you care about.”
“When I met you,” he said, “you were this immaculate, type-A corporate woman. You walked around with a kind of energy that I honestly can’t ever remember having. And all I could think was, here’s a gorgeous woman who can help me get what I want.”
She laughed. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.”
He guessed that his statement could have been taken a number of ways.
“But then, when we were out in that jungle, you made a lot of hard choices. You did the right things, and by the time we left that place you seemed different. I thought, maybe here was someone who could help me find what I need, a way to believe in something, a way to find some kind of hope again.”
She looked over at him as if he’d said something strange. “I don’t know you as a person lacking hope. You don’t give up. You don’t give in.”
“I don’t like to lose,” he said. “And if I have to go down, I’m going down swinging. But that’s a long way from believing there’s anything out there to win.”
“Defiance,” she offered.
“I guess. But it’s not the same as belief.”
She stared at him quietly for a moment, her brown eyes locked on his, the candlelight bathing her face and her lips glistening from the rum. They were close now, looking into each other’s eyes.
He reached for her, but a shrill chirping interrupted them. It was the satellite phone.
“It’s Moore,” she said, standing up.
She went for the phone.
Hawker slumped back into the lounge chair, propping one foot up dejectedly and grabbing the rum-filled glass once again. “Great. Half the Western Hemisphere is blacked out and I get a girl with a solar-powered phone.”
* * *
Danielle took a last glance at Hawker and the storm brewing on the horizon, then picked up the phone. Moving to the next room, she typed in her code, confirming the lock to receive the transmission.
“Sorry it took me so long to reestablish contact,” Moore said. “I know you tried to initiate several hours ago. Things have been a little busy up here.”
He went on to explain how badly the move had gone and how the CIA had seized on the incident as a moment to attack.
“You were out in the open?” she said, surprised.
“Unfortunately,” he said.
“Were you delayed or something?”
“No,” he said, sounding aggravated by the question. “We were on time; there was no reason to expect a spike for hours. It came off early, and a lot stronger than it should have been.”
Her mind raced, going over what had occurred on the boat. It sounded identical. Both stones had discharged unexpectedly. And seemingly random events now made sense to her.
“I think I know what happened.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“We’ve found another stone,” she told him. “We pulled it out of a sunken temple eight miles offshore.”
“That’s damn good news,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied. “But the thing is, this stone spiked also. I don’t know if you have access to the news up there but half the Yucatan is blacked out — just like Vegas from the sound of things.”
“I thought we caused that,” he said.
“Nope,” she said. “That one’s on us. And it sounds to me like the timing was identical.”
“What are you saying?”
She gathered her thoughts. “The stones sent out a constant signal, right? A carrier wave that cycles like a beacon or a searchlight, rotating over and over again. What we’ve never known is what happens when that wave bounces off something,” she said.
“You think the stones found each other,” he said.
“One stone queried and the other answered. Like our computer networks.”
“Sounds like a possibility,” he said. “How come they haven’t found each other before?”
“You had that one buried underneath Building Five,” she said. “We found this one eighty feet beneath the gulf, shielded by a thousand tons of rock and coral. But we happened to bring it up to the surface at the same time you were transporting that one.”
She expected Moore to be skeptical but he was with her.
“That makes a lot more sense than you know,” he said. “We’ve been studying the buildup of the energy wave, what we were able to record anyway. And the main signal showed a sudden divergence from its prior, constant pattern. A change in the carrier wave that we could only account for in two ways. Either the stone was having some type of internal malfunction, or the divergence was the result of the two separate waves merging.”
“It has to be,” she said.
“It would help explain some other things, too,” he added, sounding relieved. “To begin with, the burst we had up here was more powerful than normal by a factor of ten. That’s easier to understand if something new was amplifying the signal.”
“These stones were meant to do something in concert with one another,” she suggested confidently. “They might even be connected now, like some kind of network.”
He hesitated. “Maybe they were for a moment, but not now. Once we got the Brazil stone into the tunnel, the carrier wave reverted to normal.”
She considered that. Apparently Yucca Mountain would work as a containment site after all.
“I’ll have a workup done on your theory,” Moore said, “but I think you’re on the right track.”
“So what’s the next move?” she asked. “I hope you have some plan for getting this stone back there. Because I doubt I can get it through security in my carry-on. Not that I’d bring it on a plane.”
“Don’t even try
,” he said. “Just keep it with you. At least for now. Find some way to shield it or you’ll be causing blackouts every seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes.”
“I can do that,” she said. “But I need you to arrange travel for Yuri.”
“Why?”
“He was injured by the pulse. He seems to be okay now but I want to get him out of here. Whatever the Russians did to him, it seems to have made him vulnerable to harm from this thing.”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
“He has some type of implant embedded in his brain,” she said. “He had a seizure during the event and was unconscious for thirty minutes or so afterward. I got him to a hospital and they did an MRI.”
She took a breath. “Bottom line is this: He needs more care than I can give him, and we’re endangering him by keeping him with us. We’ve already been attacked once and even though we’ve moved, we’re not safe by any means.”
Moore remained awfully quiet.
“Can you arrange something discreet?” she asked.
“I told you before, you risk the Agency getting their hands on him,” Moore said. “My guess is that they’d take custody of Yuri if they got the chance and I don’t know if that would be any better than turning him over to Saravich.”
Danielle felt a wave of anger surge through her. “We can’t endanger him like this,” she said urgently. “He’s just a child, a special-needs child at that.”
“I understand what you’re saying, but things are going out of control up here,” Moore replied.
“They’re not exactly going well down here, either,” she said.
“Yuri will be safer with you,” Moore said.
Moore really had only two expressions: smug satisfaction and thinly veiled disgust. Nervousness was not his way, but she could hear a type of tension and concern in his voice that was out of place.
“What’s going on?”
“The Russians and the Chinese are going out of their minds over this event. They’re accusing us of building and testing some new weapon that we can’t control. It’s giving Stecker a lot of ammunition and the president, who I thought was smarter than that, is playing right into it.”
“Bottom line,” she asked.
“Suddenly showing up with a Russian child who’d been kidnapped by the Chinese, before being stolen by American agents and dragged off to Mexico, might not be the smartest thing to do right now.”
“Then find me a safe house,” she demanded.
“In Mexico?” he said. “Do you really think we have one?”
Danielle cursed under her breath and looked at Yuri again. She’d begun to feel as if she were risking Yuri’s life for someone else’s gain. Being forced to make that type of compromise was the main reason she’d quit the NRI in the first place.
“Are you telling me the safest place for him is here with us?”
“No,” Moore said. “I’m telling you that if things get any worse there might not be anywhere safe for anyone.”
Moore’s voice was cold and unyielding. It left her wishing she’d never answered the phone. She felt a soft breeze drift in from the balcony. The storm was growing closer.
“You’ve got ninety-two hours,” Moore said. “Make them count.”
She had no choice but to trust his take on the situation. “Find out what you can about Yuri,” she asked. “I’ll let you know before we make our next move.”
Moore signed off and Danielle put the phone down. She turned out toward the balcony. The wind had grown stronger and cooler and drops of precipitation had begun to spatter against the wall. As the lightning flashed in staggered waves, she could see the rain blowing sideways across the beach.
Hawker had moved from his chair and was now leaning against the wall in the sheltered part of the veranda, just outside the doorway. He was just standing there quietly, watching the storm.
She wondered if he was thinking of the last storm they’d been in together, a moment in time two years ago that was so fresh in her mind it could have been yesterday. She wanted to walk over to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and wait for him to turn to her, but she knew things could not be that simple.
She thought about Marcus and felt a new wave of guilt. She imagined him back there waiting, forced to trust what Moore told him about her well-being, probably worried sick over her fate. Now she wished that she’d spoken with him when offered the chance.
She took a deep breath. She didn’t like this. Didn’t like confusion.
Her mind flashed to Moore’s statement. There might not be anywhere safe for anyone. She needed to focus. To stop thinking about Hawker, to stop thinking about Marcus. To stop thinking about anything but the job in front of her.
She watched Hawker a moment longer. And then she turned from temptation, walked to her bedroom, and closed the door.
CHAPTER 38
The massive warehouse on the outskirts of Campeche belonged to a subsidiary of Kang Industrial. But the normal business that was conducted there had been moved, giving way to Kang’s pursuit of the stones.
From his chair Kang surveyed the effort. Through the windows near the back of the structure, he saw the Skycrane helicopter his men had used to hoist the statue from Isla Cubierta. It sat dormant on a helipad, waiting with two others of its kind for a new mission to fulfill. Inside the building, stacks of equipment lined the walls: there were armored vehicles squatting on massive tires, containers holding inflatable rafts, a small two-manned submarine, and a flight of drone reconnaissance aircraft similar to the U.S. Army’s Predators.
As Kang looked around, his heart swelled with pride and fresh confidence. His collection of high-tech equipment had been growing for years, part of a newfound reality he had embraced.
His deteriorating health had given him an unusual vantage point from which to study his empire. As he’d been forced to delegate and rely on others, he’d seen the growth of his empire stall and the number of failures and missed opportunities rise to a level he could not abide. It had taught him a lesson that he considered a revelation: Human limitation and fallibility were the greatest of enemies.
Just as his own body betrayed and failed him, the people around him betrayed and failed him. Physically Kang was forced to rely more and more on the machines. They strengthened him, healed him, and gave him mobility and independence.
To save his empire he had forced a similar paradigm into place. Ultramodern surveillance systems blanketed every square inch of his domain; predictive artificial intelligence software allowed him to move quickly in business and other fields without a large cast of human analysts to slow him down. Computer programs tracked the productivity and reliability of every employee he had. They decided who to hire and who to fire. There were no meetings, emotions, or friendships involved. Just facts, data, and algorithms. With the human element removed, his businesses had begun to thrive again.
And now he intended to bring similar changes to his quest for the stones. Despite the efforts of Choi and his men, Kang knew it would be machinery that allowed him to find and recover what he was looking for. Human power was only necessary to operate or initiate the equipment, and if the humans failed or lagged they were easily replaceable.
In Kang’s eyes, Choi and his men were nothing more than spare parts, one just as good as another, but the machines … the machines were the key.
One of the doctors called to Kang. They were ready to begin the latest and most advanced incarnation of his treatment. At this Kang turned his chair and crossed the floor. Choi followed dutifully at his side.
They arrived at a metallic worktable. Spread out in sections were various types of familiar equipment: the electrical stimulators, the monitors, the power packs.
“Are you ready, sir?” the doctor asked.
“Is the testing complete?” Kang asked.
The doctor nodded. “All diagnostics have been run and the feedback from the earlier sessions downloaded.”
This was the moment of truth.
“Then you may proceed,” Kang said, extending his right arm awkwardly.
The doctor assisted him, straightening and stretching Kang’s arm and sliding a gauntlet of sorts onto it. Next he connected a brace to Kang’s elbow and a shoulder harness of sorts. Once Kang was strapped in, the doctors began connecting wires to various points of the harness.
“I will leave you,” Choi said.
“You will stay,” Kang ordered.
Choi sat down uneasily.
As the doctors worked, a yellow forklift carrying several large crates traveled methodically toward them. The forklift deposited its load and then scurried away as men rushed into position and opened the crates. Inside rested the mechanical equivalent of pack mules: four-legged machines, powered by an internal engine and controlled by an advanced computer brain that kept them agile and balanced on almost any terrain while carrying hundreds of pounds of equipment.
Kang’s techs immediately began assembling them. From the look on his face, Choi seemed to take this negatively.
“Something troubles you,” Kang said.
Choi hesitated.
“You disapprove of these efforts?” Kang felt anger growing within him.
“So much equipment will slow us down,” Choi said.
“No,” Kang said. “This is the only way.”
The doctor finished connecting the wires and then taped them flat against Kang’s arm and plugged them into a power pack in the harness. Kang admired the work. With titanium braces, hydraulic actuators, and an articulated elbow and shoulder joint, his new sleeve looked like some type of futuristic body armor, but it was more than that.
The technicians tested the fit, adjusted it, and then tightened the straps again. After that they went to work connecting smaller mechanical appendages to each of Kang’s fingers.
“I wish to speak of our quarry,” Kang said to Choi. “They continue to elude you.”
“For the present,” Choi explained. “We will find them soon enough.”