by Brandt Legg
But on this day, if he’d passed a mirror, he would have thought death was near, not knowing whether Gale and Cira were going to survive the next few hours.
He glanced around El Perdido as if Gale and Cira would be there. Unlike Gale, Rip had loved the island. It had felt safe, and it was. Booker had programmed some elaborate glitch into the satellite mapping and monitoring systems that one of his companies sold to governments around the world, thereby rendering the tiny speck of land invisible. He’d even installed specific buoys miles out into the waters to keep ships from getting too close. There were also the techniques learned from the Sphere that could slightly alter reality, or at least the perception of it. The government had named the method Eysen Anomaly Matter Interference, or “EAMI,” but to them it was just a theory, a way of explaining the unexplainable.
Booker accumulated islands like others collected stamps, and he counted on the vastness of the ocean to hide his many secrets. El Perdido, like most of his hundreds of other islands, made use of the latest technology available to ensure varying degrees of privacy. Even before the Sphere and its treasure trove of new-tech, Booker’s companies were on the leading edge of aerospace, high-tech weapons, surveillance equipment, and computers. He supplied most of his enemies, including the US government, but his connection to those firms was masked behind layers of paper and false identities.
Rip made his way up to the skyroom, a tower rising four stories above the main house, its twelve-by-twelve-foot room surrounded by the lush canopy of twisting trees, pruned just enough to allow wide panoramic views of El Perdido and the ocean. The digital binoculars gave him even more coverage. He’d be able to see them approach most easily from there.
As the sun set, he thought about the time difference. It was already late afternoon the next day in Fiji.
“Where are they?” he wondered out loud as he took the Eysen-Sphere out of his custom pack. Long gone were the days of wrapping the Sphere in an old shirt and stuffing it into a regular backpack while dodging government and Vatican agents. A sophisticated pack had been made to Rip’s specifications; bulletproof, shockproof, waterproof, and trackable, exclusively by Booker. The case also had several other features to help protect the Sphere and its caretaker, including fingerprint ID, sleeping gas, electro-charge stun capability, and a short-range flame thrower.
The Eysen glowed gold and red. Rip had spent nearly every single day for seven years studying the artifact, but it still seemed incomprehensible to him. In many ways, the original Eysen-Sphere remained as much a mystery as it was the first day it fell from its stone casings in the mountains of Virginia, and yet so much had happened since then.
He’d recently confessed to Booker that the great Sphere had led him to the edges of sanity. “I have found understanding of the world that has crushed my intellect, and knowledge that has erased my intelligence.” The Eysen-Sphere was much more than the computer they first believed it to be. It was indeed the most powerful object that had been discovered in the Solar System.
Rip’s Eysen-INU lit up, not the basketball-sized original, which they often called the Sphere now, but the softball-sized commercial Eysen-INU. His hopes rose, thinking Gale might have found a way to contact him, but he saw immediately that it was Huang. After Gale or Booker, Huang was the one he would have most wanted to hear from at that moment.
Huang, a Chinese genius, lived in Hong Kong. Booker had hired him away from the largest Chinese Internet company when he was twenty-four. Now forty, he’d proven himself invaluable on many occasions. He knew more about technology on nano and quantum levels than almost anyone alive. Huang had also been a major influence on Booker’s development of Universe Quantum Physics, or UQP. From the earliest days, after Gale and Rip had “died,” Huang had been their connection to the outside scientific community, and had personally recruited many of the Hawaiian crew of scientists from all over the world. More than that though, Huang was a friend.
“Huang, do you know what’s going on?”
“I know you’re in exit. And you’re not with Gale and Cira.”
“Gale’s second biggest fear has always been that we would be separated during an exit,” Rip said, wincing as if his own words stabbed at a raw wound. “Like any parent, her greatest fear was that something would happen to Cira.”
“Double whammy, and I know she has a tough time relying on Booker.”
“They got off on a bad foot.”
“Yes, but the Sphere has proven that in spite of all of Booker’s flaws and crimes, he is a good man. He could have seized the Eysen for his own selfish means at any time.”
“Gale thinks he’s already done that. She believes he’s put the Sphere and all of us at risk when he decided to manufacture a consumer version of the Eysen-INU, not to mention what other tech he’s pulled from our work.”
“Sure, Booker is crazy, but we all know what’s coming. He needs a gigantic war chest for the battle against the Foundation . . . and others.”
“I know. I owe everything to Booker,” Rip admitted, “and I believe him when he says he’s spent the past twenty years getting in a better position to try and stop the future, or at least change it, but he takes lots of risks.”
“Talking about risks, think of the coming catastrophe . . . ” Huang’s voice trailed off in sadness. “What if we can’t stop it?”
The question had haunted Rip for years, ever since they discovered what the future held, a sickening apocalypse. He didn’t always agree with the trillionaire’s tactics, but imagining a world without Booker meant there would be no chance to avoid the billions of deaths and the brutal misery that would follow.
A world without Booker was more than possible. Many people wanted him dead. Fortunately, Booker had perfected the art of “being invisible.” He was so good at it that there were often rumors of his death, many likely perpetuated by the man himself. Gale, Rip, and Booker had that in common. In order to save the world, they had to “leave” it.
“We’re closer than ever to stopping it,” Rip assured him. “Did you read the most recent report from Hawaii?”
“Yes, it blew my mind!” Huang said. “That makes the timing of this breach even worse.”
“It is, and Booker’s got me back in isolation,” Rip said, knowing Huang knew exactly where he meant. Huang had long been the only other person with knowledge of Gale and Rip’s movements. In case something happened to Booker, it would be up to Huang to continue to safeguard them. “Can you find out anything about Gale and Cira?”
“I’m on it. I’ll tell you as soon as I get something,” Huang promised. “In the meantime, what else do you need?”
“What was the breach?”
“Don’t know, but I’ve been working on that, too.” Booker, knowing Huang would tell Rip about Cira, had purposely kept the news from him. Huang knew the tycoon could be deceptive when necessary. “We’ll find it.”
“Booker may not know, or he may not want us to know,” Rip said.
Huang started working his bank of Eysen-INUs, looking for answers. Booker had secret “back-doors” into many of the systems of intel and communications that the governments of the world, including their militaries, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, relied upon.
“Something woke up the world all at once,” Huang explained. “NSA, the Foundation, CIA, FBI, DHS, Mossad, I even see some activity from former members of the Vatican Secret Service . . . Every enemy is coming for you. They all want the only thing that can save you, the Sphere.”
“The Sphere is the only thing that can save us all.”
Chapter 8
Gale came to slowly, groggily. “Where are we?” she finally asked in a slightly slurred voice, then began panicking as she looked around. “Where is Cira?”
“She’s with Harmer back at the hospital.”
Gale’s confused look changed to one of seething rage. “Damn you, Kruse! You betrayed me. How could you? I’m her mother!” Adrenaline overcame the effects of the narcotics in h
er system and she kicked and hit him repeatedly.
He deflected her blows until she finally weakened. Her head throbbed in a woozy fog. Like in a nightmare when being chased and one’s legs didn’t work, she couldn’t find the way back to clarity, to find her daughter, to save Cira.
“I’m sorry Gale, but this was the best way to protect you both,” Kruse said, rubbing his leg where she had landed her hardest kicks on his shin.
“This wasn’t your damned choice to make,” she said, glaring back at him, shocked by the betrayal.
“I wish there had been another way,” he said.
“There was. Let me stay with my daughter. Now get ahold of Booker so I can tell him how much I hate him.”
“They were his orders, Gale. Talking to him won’t do any good.”
“Oh, I know it was him. That old businessman doesn’t care about anyone who doesn’t have his face on money.” She spat the word “businessman” as if it was an obscenity. “But Booker does care about the Sphere, and he may think it belongs to him, but it’s ours! Rip and I have given up our lives for it, and we can make it go dark if anything happens to Cira.”
Gale had never really trusted Booker, going back to her days as a business reporter for The Wall Street Journal, when she covered many of his business exploits. Booker routinely took over companies, sliced them up, cutting jobs, shuttering factories, and sometimes worse. She’d never seen anyone with such a relentless need to accumulate wealth.
Long before she knew him personally, Gale had written in an article, “Booker pursues money and power as if he wants to buy the entire world, as if he needs to own it all.” Then there were the criminal investigations. Booker didn’t seem to think laws applied to him, and certainly not the ones that pertained to insider trading, or anything having to do with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or the anti-trust regulations in the US or Europe.
She thought of Rip. He’s defended Booker all along, but he won’t now, not once he finds out Booker ordered me drugged and abducted while leaving our daughter at the mercy of the monsters who’ve hunted and tried to kill us even since before Cira was born.
Rip often talked of Booker’s “good side,” how allegedly he’d anonymously sent hundreds of thousands of poor kids to college, saved thousands of homes from foreclosure, single-handedly funded countless humanitarian charities, built water projects and schools across Africa, Central and South America, and poor regions of Asia. Gale had always had a hard time believing it, and after the events of today, she would no longer try to reconcile the two opposing views of the world’s wealthiest man.
“I mean it,” she repeated. “If I lose my daughter, he will lose the Sphere!”
Kruse nodded. He, like Gale, knew she meant what she said, but they both also knew that without Booker, Gale and Rip would be dead because of choices the two of them had made years before.
“Kruse, you let me talk to him!”
“I’m not going to waste time trying to reach him,” Kruse said. “Even if he would talk to you, it won’t do any good right now. Booker knows how you feel. He knows at this very moment that you probably want to kill him, but you know that he’s already doing everything he can to protect Cira.”
Gale nodded. She did believe that Booker would try to save Cira, but she doubted it was his top priority. Suffocating in helplessness, she pulled her knees to her chest as a terrifying wash of anxiety burned inside her, causing physical pain. The thought of Cira alone was debilitating. The idea that agents from some adversarial agency were about to storm her room was more than she could bear. It took her breath away.
“How?” she asked, hardly able to get the syllable out between gasps. “How . . . is he . . . going to . . . protect her?”
Another AX agent on the plane signaled Kruse before he could answer her.
“Now, listen to me carefully Gale. This plane is about to crash into the ocean,” Kruse said. “If you want to survive this and see Cira again, then you must do exactly what I say.”
“Crash! What are you talking about?”
“In order to live, you’re going to have to die again.”
She heard the pilot radio in a distress call. Another agent quickly assisted Gale into a special underwater air-suit, which had only recently been invented from Cosegan technology gleaned from the Eysen-Sphere.
“I don’t understand,” Gale protested again, confused and scared.
“There isn’t much time. You’ll be tethered to me, but should we get separated, there’s a tracking device built into your suit. Any of us can find you.” He pointed to the two other agents and the pilot. “It’s SPAM equipped, Slight Propulsion Assisted Movement.”
The plane started a rapid descent.
“Wait!” Gale shouted as they finished suiting her up. Her stomach wasn’t keeping up with their sudden loss of altitude.
“I’ll explain on the other side,” Kruse said.
“What?” she shrieked.
“Just brace for the impact!”
“Head between your legs,” an agent yelled, shoving her neck forward.
“As soon as we’re under, we’re going out that door.” Kruse pointed. “That door,” he repeated.
It was the last thing she heard before the crash.
Chapter 9
Harmer paid off the surgeon, a doctor, two nurses, three orderlies, and a security guard. Each was given thousands of dollars to do what they all might have done for free; protect the little girl so she might see again. Harmer had explained that Cira’s parents were whistle-blowers, similar to Edward Snowden —it was true enough— and that they had to flee, but because their daughter could not be moved, the CIA, NSA, or US military would take custody of the girl. Harmer told them the urgency of the overzealous US authorities meant that Cira would most likely be moved before it was safe.
“It’s too great a risk,” Harmer explained. “This precious six-year-old little girl shouldn’t have to be made blind because her parents got into trouble.”
After receiving a substantial pile of cash, the surgeon reluctantly agreed to the scheme and officially discharged Cira. All data would now show her no longer at the hospital. Then a nurse and an orderly carefully and slowly moved Cira’s bed from the ICU. Her new quarters, a small private room, would be quickly remodeled.
The heart of Harmer’s elaborate plan got underway when a rushed delivery of construction materials arrived from a nearby home center. A contractor, related to one of the nurses, slapped up a false wall and then mounted white shelving boards. The construction was completed in a miraculously short time. Harmer stood back and stared at the former entrance to Cira’s room, which now led to a small storage closet.
If they’re looking closely they might notice, but if we’re lucky, they’ll miss us, she thought.
A nurse and the orderlies swiftly stocked the new storage closet with medical supplies. Cira’s room would now only be accessible from a twenty-by-forty-two-inch concealed door cut into the new sheetrock. The secret entrance was located at the far end of the closet, hidden by a rack of hanging uniforms. Harmer had rearranged the garments three times.
“This is a lot of trouble for nothing,” one of Harmer’s paid-off-nurses said. “When the agents find out the girl has been discharged, why would they still bother to look for her?”
“Oh, they’ll look.”
“But it’s a big hospital. Will they search every room?”
“Every room and every closet,” Harmer said, worrying as she checked the appearance of the storage closet again. As a final defense, Harmer would be in the room with Cira, and planned to take hostage the first agent who found his way into the secret hiding place. At least that way she could force a standoff that could buy Cira more time until help might reach them.
Once she was convinced nothing more could be done, Harmer, a nurse, and an orderly moved into Cira’s room. The other paid-off-nurse and two extra orderlies were on stand-by. The paid-off-security guard would be
Harmer’s eyes and ears throughout the rest of the hospital.
Harmer reported the scheme to her boss across a scrambled line.
“It’s a weak and dangerous plan,” Booker said, sipping on a green tea, acai, and seaweed smoothie.
“There’s no alternative. Cira can’t be moved,” Harmer replied in a strained voice.
Booker, frustrated, could not think of another option. He admired Harmer for her dedication to him and to the mission, for her loyalty to Gaines and Asher, and for putting herself in such jeopardy, but he knew her efforts were mostly, if not entirely, for Cira. Harmer loved the child.
“Any of those orderlies or nurses could crack as soon as the big guns show up,” Booker warned.
“I know,” Harmer said tensely. “Again, no choice.”
Booker checked the time. It wouldn’t be long now. “I’ll have people ready and waiting to get you and the girl out as soon as you say.”
“Let’s hope it gets to that,” Harmer agreed, knowing they would have to survive hidden in the hospital for at least a week before any kind of evacuation could be attempted. Harmer had made up her mind that it would be safer for Cira to risk capture than trying to move her too soon. If the worst happened, she’d have to count on someone in the chain of command taking pity on the child and allowing her to remain in the hospital until her eyes healed properly. “If not, maybe they’ll let her stay here.”
“Not likely. They cannot risk the other patients,” Booker replied. “The NSA knows there are at least half a dozen groups that would attack the building in an effort to capture Gale and Rip’s daughter, and most of them wouldn’t give a damn if she’s blind or not. They want the Eysen, and would gamble that Rip would trade anything to get his daughter back.”
“I know.”
Harmer thought of the odds. The NSA and CIA were formidable opponents, but Booker had contacts and plants within their high walls. However, the Foundation was the greatest enemy. They, too, had people planted throughout the US government like a cancer, and although Booker was the wealthiest person in the world, he was also not very popular among the world’s elite. The next one hundred and nine richest people on Earth were part of the Foundation, and about seventy percent of the three hundred billionaires below them were also either direct members, or affiliated in some way with the Foundation. They had enough combined money and network to oppose Booker.