by Brandt Legg
COSEGA
SPHERE
Brandt Legg
Cosega Sphere (Book Four of the Cosega Sequence)
Published in the United States of America by Laughing Rain
Copyright © 2016 by Brandt Legg
All rights reserved.
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935070-25-2
ISBN-10: 1-935070-25-8
Cover designed by: Jarowe
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Published in the United States of America.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
BrandtLegg.com
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Epilogue
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Books by Brandt Legg
Acknowledgements
For Teakki and Ro
Chapter 1
“They’re alive,” Taz, a young operative, said to his superior, a man known only as Stellard. As a cool mist rose off the distant Potomac River, the two men quietly considered the implications.
“You’re certain?” Stellard asked, eyeing Taz, whom he’d personally selected nearly seven years earlier to lead the search. Seven long years of few leads, countless dead ends, and zero proof that the pair of fugitives they sought, who had officially been declared dead by the US government, were anything but dead.
Taz nodded. “Both of them, alive and well.” He traced a finger over the five gold rings on his right hand, imagining a fight. He often jabbed his fists in quick thrusts, as if he had to punch something, or someone.
“Then the Eysen . . . it survived, too?” Stellard asked, briskly rubbing his icy hands together. His many layers of clothing offering inadequate protection on the brisk morning, though he was always cold anyway.
“There’s no doubt,” Taz replied, unzipping his light leather jacket, only a tee shirt beneath. He was never cold. “They are alive,” he repeated calmly.
From the fourth level of the nine-story parking garage, Stellard looked down on the busy highway. An electrical relay station was visible, spread across the adjoining property. He knew it would be impossible for someone to monitor their conversation. This location topped the Foundation’s safe-list for just that reason, yet this information, that Ripley Gaines and Gale Asher were alive, was enough to make the impossible suddenly doable. He shivered against the cool air of an early spring Northern Virginia morning and nervously glanced up at the concrete ceiling, reflexively looking for “eyes” and “ears.”
Taz knew what the older man was thinking. He could tell the worry Stellard usually displayed had now stretched into fear. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
Stellard sighed and squinted his dark eyes out toward the traffic before speaking. “Of course. But you see, as long as we were searching, there was a chance . . . ” He sipped from a large paper cup of hot tea and started over. “You see, if the Eysen really had been destroyed, then the world would be safer. So many would be safer.”
He mumbled something inaudible, but Taz didn’t respond. He didn’t understand, but it wasn’t his job to understand. He’d been recruited seven years earlier by the Aylantik Foundation to find two dead people. The Foundation, a secretive organization with seemingly unlimited funding, was a private “think-tank” that employed futurists, scientists, engineers, economists, as well as former members of the military and intelligence communities. The brain trust was charged with planning and preparing for the future, a future that they would help shape. However, the Foundation had an even more covert mission within its hidden work—to locate Gaines and Asher.
The pair, Gaines, an archaeologist, and Asher, a reporter, had allegedly been killed by US government agents while trying to escape with an ancient artifact of immense scientific significance. The Foundation needed to be sure they were dead, and more importantly, that the Eysen no longer existed.
Stellard took another look around, then moved closer to Taz. In a raspy whisper, he asked the single most dangerous question he’d ever voiced.
“Do you know where the Eysen is?”
“Yes,” Taz mouthed, nodding slowly. “I’m heading there now.”
Chapter 2
“They’re coming,” Kruse said, voice strained, as the vehicle bounced over a large pothole.
Gale Asher, who’d been on the run for nearly seven years, had never been so terrified. Kruse, a man she trusted with her life, mainly because he’d saved it so many times, looked as close to panicked as she’d ever seen. Gale didn’t care about that though. She didn’t want to know about panic and problems, she only wanted her daughter to be okay.
The details of the accident were vague. Cira, her and Rip’s six-year-old daughter, had been hurt at school and airlifted to the hospital on a neighboring island. It was serious enough that emergency surgery had already begun in order to save her life.
Kruse navigated the rutted dirt roads as fast as he dared. Their armored Range Rover vibrated across the washboard surface, jarring Gale’s already shot nerves.
“We have to get you out of the country,” Kruse said, concerned, glancing at Gale’s distraught face. He’d devoted too many years to keeping the beautiful fugitive alive to risk losing her now.
“As soon as we get Cira,” Gale said firmly. “Any word from Rip?”
“He’s in the air.”
“Coming here?” Gale asked, relieved. Her curly blond ponytail swayed wildly in the dusty air.
“No.” Kruse hesitated. “El Perdido.”
“What?” Gale shouted. “Why isn’t he coming here?”
“Because they are coming,” Kruse snapped back. “They know where you are.”
“How?” she asked, as if hearing it for the first time, finally letting it register that her daughter wasn’t just in danger from the surgery she was undergoing, but that there were people on the way who would kill them all.
“The hospital,” Kruse responded more evenly. “They took blood.”
“But we’re in Fiji. We’re isolated from the rest of the world, that’s why we chose—”
“The hospitals are all linked around the world now,” Kruse said, interrupting her. “Ever since Eysen-INU 4.0. It’s instant.”
Almost everyone on the planet used Eysen-INU or “Information Navigation Units” to communicate, compute, surf the internet, take video and photos, watch movies, and generally do everything. The Eysen-INU was indispensable, virtually replacing phones, cameras, laptops, and desktop computers. The INU design and technology had been modeled after the Eysen artifact, what they now called the “Sphere.”
Gale shook her head, staring out the window as a glimpse of the ocean came into view between the trees. “Who’s coming?”
“All of them.” The tattoo on Kruse’s right wrist showed as he swung the wheel around, taking a sharp turn, depicting five bullets penetrating a heart. A new bullet was added each time he killed a person, something he never enjoyed doing, but suddenly it looked very likely that it would be happening again. Kruse, an experienced intelligence operative, who relied on logic and strategy to keep his clients and himself alive, could sense the coming war.
Gale nodded. Of course they were all coming. She hadn’t even needed to ask. “How long do we have?”
“Maybe four hours.”
“Will Cira be out of surgery by then?”
“If all goes well.”
“Then we’ll be okay. We can make it,” Gale said hopefully. The lush jungle blurring past had once seemed so familiar and safe, but now, like everything, it had become another obstacle.
Kruse didn’t think so, but it wasn’t the time for that news. Gale Asher was a cool and smart reporter. She’d even developed into quite a scientist since he’d known her, but she was also a mother, and the threat of losing her daughter could turn her into a hysterical, irrational fighter. That was not what he needed at the moment.
However, Gale knew Rip would not have willingly flown away when his daughter was in danger. “Does Rip know Cira is in surgery? Does he know how serious this is?”
Kruse did not answer.
“Does he?” she demanded.
He turned and saw fury flash in her normally magnetic blue eyes. “Gale, it would have been impossible to get him on the plane to El Perdido if he knew about Cira. We told him your cover’s been blown and that we’re following the ‘exit.’”
The exit, a long-in-place and ever-changing plan in case of threat, dictated their moves. Everyone would get out from wherever they were and rendezvous at El Perdido, or, if that were impossible, a list of other “temporarily safe” locations had been memorized.
El Perdido, Spanish for “the Lost,” was a remote island far off the Pacific coast of Central America, which had been turned into perhaps the greatest and most comfortable hideout in the world. It was luxurious and beautiful, with every imaginable amenity, and Gale despised it.
Yet their time on the island had saved them from the many groups still searching for them. The world’s wealthiest person, Booker Lipton, had funded the island and everything else during their escape and years in hiding. Booker, even more secretive than wealthy, had obtained a reputation as a rogue and dangerous businessman, accused of everything from murder, to treason, to inciting revolution and funding wars. Much of it was true.
Gale, Rip, and their daughter’s life were in his hands.
“He’s never going to forgive you,” she said. “If Cira doesn’t make it . . . ”
Gale began to cry. She thought of their daughter’s bright smile. They’d named her for the Italian word meaning the sun because the sun had been the key to understanding the Cosega Sequence, but it had come to mean so much more as Cira brought light into their lives.
“Cira’s going to make it,” Kruse growled as Gale wiped away her tears. He also loved Cira. He loved her as much as he’d ever allowed himself to love anyone. “My job is to keep all of you alive. I’m doing my damned job. You have to trust me.” He reached across and put his hand on Gale’s shoulder. “Times like this, you and Rip are in no frame of mind to decide what to do.”
“I know,” she said quietly, stifling back tears. She clutched Cira’s tiny cloth cat that she’d grabbed on her dash out of the house. Cira slept with it every night, told it her secrets, and used it as a worry doll. “Do we really have four hours?”
“It depends where the agents are.” Kruse swerved to avoid a fallen tree. “The NSA doesn’t have anyone in Fiji, so they’ll borrow someone from the CIA out of Sydney. It’s a four-hour flight. The Foundation will have people in LA, that’s ten hours, but they could have already been in the air for half an hour or more. Who they have in Hawaii and New Zealand is the real question.”
Gale reflected on this. Ever since Rip and she had decided to flee with the Eysen, an impossibly futuristic basketball-sized artifact pulled from an eleven-million-year-old cliff in the mountain forests of Virginia, their lives had been in constant danger. The NSA, FBI, Mossad, and secret Vatican agents had relentlessly pursued them.
Then, seven years ago, they faked their deaths, which had purchased some temporary peace. But when “their” horribly burned bodies, to the point of cremation, could not be conclusively identified, some doubted whether it had really been Gaines and Asher. Because the stakes were so incredibly high, they had continued to be pursued, even in “death.”
Rip had called the Sphere “an instrument to view eternity.” It showed them events stretching from the origins of the universe into the future, but Gale believed it also held within its core the very essence of existence. In passing, they’d seen cures for cancer and other diseases, plans for astonishing inventions, planets and places too incredible to believe. However, navigating back to where they wanted to go had proved deeply challenging.
Booker had assembled a secret team of science’s greatest minds to study the ancient object. One of his companies had managed to partially reverse-engineer the Eysen-Sphere, and had marketed it as the Eysen-INU. Far more than just the ultimate computer, the INU combined and eclipsed every electronic device by decades. He’d sold billions of them, and they continued selling. His power and wealth grew in tandem with the unprecedented sales.
Although the INUs were nowhere as sophisticated as the real object, even though they had so far surpassed any technology the world had seen before—portable and powerful, they did everything, and came preloaded with incredible amounts of information—the Eysen-INU had revolutionized the consumption of information and knowledge. Booker owned one hundred percent of his companies, so the Eysen had taken him from being a common billionaire to becoming the world’s first and only trillionaire.
Revelations released from the Eysen had led to the collapse of all the major religions in the world. During the years since the find, and although the Vatican had officially folded, a potent underground movement had emerged in an effort to bring the Catholic Church back to its prior glory. But as dangerous as Gale considered the religious zealots to be, it was the Foundation that scared her the most.
Kruse felt the same way about the Foundation, and at that very moment he was desperately hoping that their intelligence was correct about the Foundation having no agents closer than Los Angeles. The commercial Eysen-INUs marketed
by Booker had made the world a smaller place, one in which it was harder to hide. The only advantage they had left was their head start against those coming for them, but Kruse never liked to count on time, because he absolutely knew that time was a funny thing.
Chapter 3
Taz, wearing his standard black t-shirt, black jeans, leather jacket, and brown construction boots, boarded one of the Foundation’s many “new generation” private jets twenty minutes after wrapping the meeting with Stellard. A commercial airliner might take him twenty hours to reach Fiji, but the Foundation pilot could make it there in about twelve.
Still too long, he thought, but the world is a big place and it takes time to get around. Hopefully the team in the Philippines will get Gaines and Asher long before I reach Fiji.
A beautiful Foundation “travel executive” brought him a drink. They exchanged smiles, and he remembered an encounter with her six or seven months earlier.
Taz attracted women like a rock star. Maybe it was the green eyes, or the short, shaggy dark hair, or the biceps and his “cut” physique. Taz never gave it too much thought, just took the parties when they came. If asked, he might have chalked it up to the heavy gold rings which adorned his right hand, but most of the women would say it was his intense energy, as if he’d just blasted off the screen as the hero in a “save-the-world” action movie. This time, as he took a few swift punches at the air, he’d have to take a rain check on the private party. There was too much work to do.
He checked the time. His people would reach the hospital in Suva in less than five hours. The girl, Gaines’ and Asher’s daughter, was still in surgery. No way they could move her that soon. Taz smiled.
Fugitives should not have children, he thought. Gaines has been the target of the greatest manhunt in history. He’s miraculously eluded everyone from the top intelligence agencies for almost seven years. And now he goes and gets himself caught due to a six-year-old’s playground accident.
Taz read the report on his Eysen-INU. The little girl had been playing, and somehow a game the children called “ribbon tag” became bloody after one child had sneaked in a pair of scissors to cut the ribbons. After a chase and tangle, Gaines’ daughter fell, the open scissors penetrating her eyes.