Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4)

by Brandt Legg

  “How close is a team?” Rathmore asked.

  “Close.”

  “Let’s go! Move on that hospital. Own it, own it!” Rathmore chanted. “I don’t give a damn if we blind or maim that girl so long as we have a breathing, talking little angel to use to flush out her God-forsaken, loving parents.”

  The noise in the room grew. A SEAL team with CIA and NSA operatives was prepped to go. Intelligence came flooding in as partial focus was shifted to Fiji. They learned of the Foundation’s armed occupation of the hospital and quickly discovered what floor Cira was on based upon the number of soldiers concentrated there. The operation would be complicated by the presence of the Foundation’s people and local police, but they were no match for a SEAL team and a surprise attack. The bigger issue was collateral damage to the hundreds of patients in the hospital, in addition to doctors, nurses, and other staff.

  “The order is this,” Rathmore said, raising his voice to be heard across the room. “Get the girl, alive. Everything, and everyone else, is second.”

  A few technicians and operatives gave him questioning looks.

  “Everyone be reminded this is a Scorch and Burn operation!” Rathmore yelled. “Eat them up!”

  “Sir,” another technician interrupted him. “We just got word. The Chinese and Russians have engaged each other on the border near North Korea.”

  Rathmore looked at Murik, stunned. “How in the hell is this possible?” Rathmore asked, switching one of the big screens to satellite coverage of the region around the apparent Chinese and Russian conflict.

  “I’ll be a son of . . . ” Rathmore stared at the images disbelievingly. “Those crazies are shooting at each other.”

  “Looks like a real war,” Murik said, dumbfounded. “CIA didn’t see this coming.”

  “Neither did the NSA, or the Pentagon,” Rathmore said. “But somebody did . . . Yamane! Where is that dammed nutty professor?” he asked Murik before turning back to the subordinate who gave him the news. “What started it?”

  “Apparently a flare-up over disputed territory amounting to 580,000 square miles of land that Russia’s snatched from China over the past hundred and fifty years.”

  “And today, this comes up? Today!” Rathmore was dizzy with the scenarios crisscrossing his brain. The vanishing Gulfstream, Gaines’ daughter still in Fiji, held by the Aylantik Foundation, a war between major powers in Asia predicted by . . . “Get that damned professor on the screen now!”

  “I’ve been trying to track down Yamane since the plane disappeared,” Murik admitted. “It’s as if he’s vanished.”

  “People. Don’t. Vanish,” Rathmore said in a controlled rage, emphasizing each syllable. “Planes and people don’t vanish. They’re out there somewhere, and we have the resources of the Untied States of America at our disposal. Bring it to bear! Do it!”

  —O—

  While they were waiting for agents in Hawaii to track down the sniffling professor and get him back in front of a camera link, they continued to prepare for the retrieval mission in Fiji. Even if the sniffling professor hadn’t predicted the outbreak of war between the two powerful nations, the situation would have been a major distraction.

  “World stability is a far more fragile conundrum than people care to admit,” Murik said, feeling confused and overwhelmed and failing to see the humor in the situation. “On any given day, the final war can begin.”

  Even Rathmore, stressed, frustrated, and barking commands like a crazed fan in a sports stadium, willing his team back on top, was concerned by the Russia-China drama. Any political science major could tell them this was not like a skirmish in the Middle East. A war between these mighty giants would shake the Earth like nothing had since the fall of the Nazis. More than that, Rathmore was stunned and awed by the prospect that someone had seen this coming in the Sphere.

  Rathmore, one of the NSA’s top pitbulls, had rarely felt true fear in his life. The first was when he watched his father beat his mother, the second when his wife was destroyed by cancer, and now, this. All he could think of was a mirror smashing into his face, reflecting the fear, showing him his weakness, destroying his power. Damn that Sphere!

  The giant screens circling the room switched from satellite scenes of the crisis in Asia to views of Fiji, and still others swept across views of the vast Pacific where the Gulfstream had vanished. Steady streams of data came across the twenty-six mid-sized monitors, which hung under the giant ones. Hundreds of conceivable scenarios rolled through the massive computer programs designed to anticipate every possible outcome. A new Korean war, hostilities bleeding over to include Taiwan, Japan, satellites targeted in space, even nuclear war.

  It was a terrifying development. Rathmore paced, waiting for Professor Yamane, waiting for the SEAL team to get the kid, waiting for some sign of the Gulfstream, waiting for contact from King, who had suddenly gone silent. He didn’t know exactly how, but his gut told him that the little girl wasn’t just the key to finding the Sphere, but the Sphere was the key to containing the war in Asia.

  “Everything depends on our getting that kid!” he said, tasting the bitter residue of tension on his lips. “Where the hell is Professor Yamane?”

  “Sir,” a young analysis began, “Honolulu PD has just confirmed . . . The professor you’re looking for, Professor Yamane, is dead.”

  Chapter 47

  Taz’s Foundation superiors were waiting for an update. Stellard had been clear—get Dabnowski back on board. Already having Gaines’ daughter in hand, and adding one of the top UQP/Sphere scientists would put the Foundation in the lead in the race for the future.

  Tugging nervously at the gold ring on his thumb, Taz didn’t know what to do. He knew he was sitting on the greatest discovery in human history. What can it do? What are the implications to the future? The past? Do they know? The NSA? The Foundation? He also knew that Dabnowski’s life was in danger, as was his.

  “Wow,” Taz breathed. “I’m sorry I was such a jerk earlier. I didn’t know . . . I’m not the brightest guy in the world.”

  The admission amused and impressed Dabnowski. “Maybe at least you finally get it. You may not grasp it, obviously you’ll never be capable of that, but you get it.” Dabnowski looked over his shoulder, scanned the trees, then cast a quick look up at the sky.

  “Who else knows?” Taz asked, now fully on board with Dabnowski’s nervousness and unable to deny the assessment of his ability to comprehend scientific knowledge.

  “There are five of us who authored the paper, two more have an idea. And then there’s the NSA.”

  “The NSA knows?”

  “They know everything,” Dabnowski said, his tone suggesting it would be silly to imagine otherwise. “How come no one wants to believe we live in an Orwellian world? In fact, it’s way beyond 1984. They have technology that even Orwell couldn’t dream of, and if they get the Sphere, they’ll be able to know what you’re going to think before you even think it.”

  Taz nodded and clenched his fists, the heavy rings pressing painfully into his fingers, the largest, a gold broken heart he’d had made after the only woman he really ever loved walked out on him. Taz knew better than Dabnowski that privacy had choked its last few tortured breaths in the years following the September 11th terrorist attacks. Ever since, it had been an ever increasingly fast nosedive down the slippery slope.

  “What about Gaines?”

  “Gaines is an interesting man,” Dabnowski said. “He’s not a physicist, he’s an archaeologist. It’s odd the Sphere found him because it’s not an artifact, it’s a universe. As brilliant as he is though, he’s not really equipped to study it.”

  “You said the Sphere found him. Don’t you mean the other way around?”

  “If you ever get to see the Sphere, you’ll realize that Gaines was chosen to find it.”

  “What does that even mean?” Taz asked. Caught up in Dabnowski’s paranoia, he never stopped watching the shadows. “He found it sealed in a cliff. Solid roc
k. The Sphere is eleven million years old, right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “So who decided Gaines should find it?”

  “The ones who built it. The Cosegans.”

  Taz didn’t want to question Dabnowski further. He knew this nerd had ten times the smarts he did, but it wasn’t for fear of looking stupid again.

  Taz did not want the answer. He couldn’t handle Dabnowski saying that somebody eleven million years ago knew all of this was going to happen, knew about Gaines, and had left the Sphere for him encased in stone. Taz couldn’t even handle the possibility of time travel. He’d read a few novels about the subject, seen the movie Back to the Future, so he could play along with that, but advanced civilizations, millions of years earlier, dabbling in the current world? He couldn’t go there.

  “What are you going to do?” Dabnowski asked after a long minute of silence.

  “Where are the other four authors of the report?”

  “I’m not sure. Two of them are likely at the Observatories. The other ones might be at the university.”

  “Has the NSA detained any of the UQP scientists?”

  “There are over a thousand of us,” Dabnowski said, as if that number protected them from arrest. “We’re talking about the brightest scientists in the world.”

  “We’re talking about the NSA,” Taz countered.

  Dabnowski nodded knowingly as he looked up the beach at a man heading in their direction.

  “It’s only a matter of time before they get Gale Asher and then Gaines,” Taz said. “And then they’ll want a lid on this. Everyone with knowledge of the Sphere will be arrested. The NSA won’t care if there are ten thousand of you. Count on it.” Taz stared directly at the physicist. “But that’s more than I can worry about at the moment. Let’s concentrate on getting you and the other four authors away from here.”

  “Here?”

  “Off the island.”

  Chapter 48

  Gale relayed the horrible saga she’d endured to Rip, beginning with the call from Harmer informing her that Cira had been injured and taken to the hospital. Each detail ratcheted up the couple’s already strained emotions. The warm breeze carrying the fragrance of flowers and tropical fruits and the gentle sound of the turquoise waters lapping the shore belied the tension contained in her story. Rip listened silently, stunned by the plane crash into the Pacific, shaking his head at the decision to board a commercial airliner, and riveted by her account of Kruse getting them off that plane and onto the Gulfstream.

  “But they must have followed you, right?” Rip asked. “How did you escape Hawaii? How did they even let you take off?” he wondered, looking up into the sky, expecting a squadron of fighters to spray the beach with machinegun fire.

  “I don’t know,” Gale said, “but you know Booker is decades ahead in technology because of what we’ve discovered in the Sphere, what he’s stolen from the Cosegans.”

  Rip didn’t want to get into that debate again, not now. Although he was not in the mood to defend Booker after hearing of the deceptions he’d used on them in the past day and a half, he also couldn’t deny that, at the moment, his family was still alive. They had all survived, except maybe the two people most directly involved with their protection, Kruse and Harmer.

  Rip filled her in on what he knew, then shared the painful revelation that Cira was now in the hands of the Foundation.

  “Get. Booker. On. The. Line,” Gale demanded.

  A minute later Huang’s face filled the monitor from Rip’s INU. Gale adored their collaborator, and was grateful to see him.

  “Blue Eyes,” Huang said, beaming. “Thank the stars you made it.”

  “No doubt I owe much of that to your abilities at cloaking planes and islands,” she said.

  “The NSA has an entire team devoted to uncovering what they call EAMI, but if they knew how far we’d come with Eysen Anomaly and the promise it holds, they would put the entire agency on it,” Huang said, cocky with the triumphant victory of Gale’s escape.

  She nodded sadly, but couldn’t help smiling at him. “But Cira . . . ”

  “I know, the sun is less bright,” he said, a reference to her name’s origin. “It’s dangerous right now, but the Foundation is steady. They won’t be careless with her, it’s just that the others might. We have to get her.”

  “We haven’t been able to raise Booker,” Rip said.

  “I’ll try to bypass his queue,” Huang replied.

  Rip sent Huang an encrypted message while they waited. Huang relayed a simple ping as confirmation he’d received it and Rip knew his request would be followed to the letter.

  A short time later, Booker came across on audio only. “Gale, I’m glad you made it.”

  “We can talk about that some other time, Booker,” Gale gritted out, as though each word caused her physical pain. “You get my daughter or you’re going to be anything but glad I survived.”

  “Gale, please don’t threaten me. I know we’ve had our differences, but—”

  “You have no idea what a threat is if you think I’ve even begun to threaten you!” Gale shouted back. “You’ve backed us into a corner, dropped us on this damned remote island, and left us with only one way to save our daughter.”

  “Which is?”

  “You know what it is,” Gale snapped. “And we’re prepared to carry it out.”

  Normally Booker would have reacted to a threat in a very different manner, but he understood how she felt. “I’m all over it,” Booker said.

  “What’s the plan?” Rip asked coldly.

  “We’re going in for a rescue in a matter of minutes.” Booker went on to explain the false deal with the Foundation and the fact that the NSA was about to bring a SEAL team in to capture Cira. They needed to know the risks. There was no other choice now. “I’ll be back in touch shortly.”

  “No!” Gale shouted. “Keep us on the line!”

  But Booker was gone.

  Rip thought of the message he’d sent Huang. If Cira was not returned safely to Rip and Gale, and if something were to happen to any of the three of them, then Huang was supposed to give the exact coordinates of El Perdido, along with a list of the key scientists who had contributed the most to the research, to Dixon Barbeau. Rip could still stop the order, and he wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but he believed that Barbeau was the only other person who understood the stakes, and who also had the connections to get to the Sphere before the NSA or the Foundation. Still, it felt too much like retribution to Rip.

  “This is not about revenge,” Gale said. “Booker has had us and the Sphere for seven years. If we wind up losing Cira, then . . . ”

  “Crying Man promised me he would protect her,” Rip interjected.

  Gale looked at Rip with a silent stunned expression. “Crying Man? You’ve seen him? You talked to him?”

  Rip explained everything that had happened in the past few days, starting in Hawaii. “All along, the Sphere, the very thing we were trying to save, has been the very thing that could save us.”

  “Us as in our family, or us as in the human race?” Gale asked.

  “Both.”

  “Who else knows what happened in Hawaii?”

  “A handful of the scientists,” Rip said. “You remember Dabnowski? He and four others presented a paper to the brain trust.” The brain trust was comprised of the top twelve scientists in UQP. “We’re so close to a breakthrough. We actually found a command language, but it was beyond my skills. I have the data on my INU, but I don’t really fully understand it.”

  “They’ve raided the university, Gale said. “The AX agent on the plane told me. They’ve started rounding up all the scientists and are grilling them. They won’t talk, will they?”

  “Some of them will. They’re scientists, not terrorists. They know nothing about resisting interrogation methods, and the CIA is very good at getting people to talk.”

  Gale nodded, her expression conveying fear and anger. “How
can Crying Man protect Cira?” she asked.

  “Crying Man, or something, allowed your plane to land here undetected.”

  “That was Booker. The same way he keeps this island hidden, some program fed into the satellites. His company manufactures most of them,” Gale reminded him. “If Booker wasn’t certain that we could have landed invisibly, he wouldn’t have let the pilot get within a hundred miles of El Prison.”

  “But he got that technology from the Eysen.”

  “He’s taken much from the Eysen,” Gale reminded him.

  “Booker told me that the NSA has an entire team studying what he’s been able to do. They have a theory called EAMI, Eysen Anomaly Matter Interference. They use it to explain stuff that is beyond scientific knowledge or current technology. It’s a way to put together enough pieces of the puzzle that the government scientists can reverse-engineer some of what he’s done.”

  “Or use it to find him,” Gale added. “How has he been able to stay hidden, yet they found us in Fiji?”

  “You know how,” Rip said, grabbing her hand and finding her eyes. “Cira. It was all an accident.”

  “There is no such thing as accidents!” Glare protested. “Oh, Rip, our baby is all alone! She’s suffering . . . alone.” Gale stood up. “Damn that Booker. He had them drug me, and—”

  “He may not have gone about it the right way, but we both know you’d be in custody now if he hadn’t and Cira would still be alone.”

  “Are you on his side?”

  “It’s the truth, Gale. You know it is.”

  “Truth? The only truth I know is that Booker’s about to bring a full-scale war into that hospital. Our little girl will be surrounded by explosions, guns, and death.”

  “Why are you so against Booker? He’s kept us safe for seven years, allowed us the time to explore the Eysen. You knew having a baby could expose us. Whatever mistakes he’s made, we’re still here, and you’re always telling me how powerful forgiveness is . . . Forgive Booker!”