Genome

by A. G. Riddle

  “So hack that server. Hack the satellite. Make it happen.”

  “It’s not that simple. The server returns a code to the implant inside his brain—that’s the second black box. The code is encrypted with a proprietary algorithm. We don’t even have a place to start. It’s like a checksum to make sure the request is valid. Sending a malformed code could have unexpected consequences.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Guess.”

  Byron exhaled. “Best case, the checksum fails, the system realizes it’s being hacked, and it completely shuts down. We’d have no chance to enable him to ever recover his memories.”

  “Worst case?”

  “Brain damage. The faulty code scrambles the memories or releases the wrong amount of trigger. He could end up a vegetable, or dead.”

  Conner closed his eyes. “Where does that leave us?”

  “Same place we were on the Kentaro Maru.”

  The mention of the massive cargo ship where Conner had imprisoned his brother brought back bad memories. He had made a mistake there. He wasn’t about to repeat it.

  “We’re not letting him go again. We barely recovered him last time.”

  “True, but this time one thing is different.” Byron held up the phone and opened the Labyrinth Reality app. “On the ship we didn’t have a location.”

  A dialog appeared on the screen.

  1 Entrance Located.

  Byron tapped it, and GPS coordinates appeared. Conner committed them to memory.

  “We don’t have to let him go,” the programmer said. “We just have to take him here.”

  Conner didn’t like it, but it was a solution. At the moment, their only solution.

  “All right. I’ll take care of Hughes. Where are we with rebuilding the Rapture control software?”

  “That we’ve made some progress on.”

  “How much?”

  “Hard to know. We’re maybe… fifteen percent done.”

  Conner shook his head. “You have to work faster.”

  “We can’t—”

  “You will. Time is running out. Those ships out there looking for us will find us within a week. At that point, they’ll attack this island just like they did the Isle. They’ll kill most of us. The rest will be imprisoned for life, or executed.” Conner paused, letting the words sink in. “Rapture Control is our only chance of survival.”

  Byron nodded. “We’ll get it done, sir.”

  Conner stared at him a moment, then turned and walked out.

  He went straight to the situation room. A large screen covered the back wall, displaying satellite photography and real-time stats. Rows of desks ran the length of the room, and almost every station was occupied. It was crunch time, and all hands were on deck.

  Conner stopped at the watch commander’s desk. The red-haired woman, Melissa Whitmeyer, was the best operations technician they had left.

  Conner scribbled the GPS coordinates on a sheet of paper on her desk. “I need to know where this is.”

  Whitmeyer glanced at the numbers and pulled up a map. The location was near San Francisco, and on a road that ran from the coast to the mountains. Conner knew it before she called out the name: Sand Hill Road. For a few months in the year 2000, during the dot-com bubble, office rents along that lonely stretch in the rolling hills of California were the highest in the world. The glowing dot in the center of the map was the building where Desmond’s firm, Icarus Capital, had operated. Getting there might be a problem.

  “What’s the American security situation?”

  “Airspace and coastlines are locked down. They’re very worried about a conventional invasion given their degraded military status.”

  “Land borders?”

  “Little more porous. Lots of troops massed on the Mexican border in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”

  “What about California?”

  “They’ve reinforced the checkpoints at the major roads, but that’s about it.”

  “Situation in Mexico?”

  “Civil War.”

  “Who?”

  “Cartels and organized crime versus the new Mexican government. Cartels are winning. They see it as their opportunity to turn the country into a legitimized narco state.”

  “Okay. Get one of the planes ready. I need a tac team prepped for departure in thirty minutes. Seven members. I want the best.”

  Conner told her the rest of his plan, and she began searching the map, looking for a suitable location.

  Conner briefed Yuri in his office. The Russian sat impassively, as if Conner was relating the weather forecast. Conner wondered if living through the Nazi assault on Stalingrad as a child had permanently altered the man. Or maybe Yuri already knew what was going on… or had expected it. Sometimes his gray eyes and placid stare unnerved even Conner.

  Yuri’s voice was just above a whisper. “Your brother is sublimely clever, Conner. He may have planned for this contingency. Taking him to the locations where he’s hidden his memories could be the next phase of his plan, which we still don’t understand.”

  “We have no choice. I’ll handle him.”

  “And if he won’t turn over Rendition?”

  “He will.”

  Yuri looked away. “He betrayed us once. He will again if given the opportunity. Remember what’s at stake. And that no matter what happens, we can repair him with the Looking Glass.”

  “He’s not the only one who betrayed us. Lin Shaw conspired with the Americans during the assault. She ordered our troops to surrender.”

  “It seems she’s been playing a larger game.”

  “What kind of game?”

  “Lin is the last surviving member of the original Citium cell. True believers, committed to finding the ultimate truth. The purpose of the human race. I think we can assume that all these years she’s been secretly working on her own Looking Glass project.”

  That could be a problem. “So why hasn’t she completed it?”

  “I see several possibilities. We had her son. And I threatened her daughters. But I think the most likely reason is that she lacked the requisite research.”

  “The Beagle,” Conner whispered.

  “Yes. Fifteen days ago, teams began bringing artifacts and notes to the surface.”

  “What have they found?”

  “I don’t know. If it’s the piece Lin needs to complete her Looking Glass, she apparently hasn’t used it yet.”

  “What does that mean for us?”

  “I don’t know exactly. We can assume her work might be a problem—if she completes it. But she never will. I’m seeing to that.”

  Chapter 3

  In the office adjacent to the ship’s cargo hold, a handheld radio crackled to life. The sound of wind and static overpowered Dr. Nigel Greene’s voice. On his second attempt, Peyton was able to make out the words.

  “Dr. Shaw, come in.”

  Lin stood from her narrow bed and snatched the radio. “Shaw here.”

  “Ma’am, you’re needed on deck.”

  Lin shot Peyton a knowing glance.

  “On my way.”

  Both women downed their coffee and zipped up their cold weather coveralls. Outside the office, the biology team was still crowded around the bank of computers, reviewing the data set from Rubicon. Just beyond them lay two rows of cubicles with a wide corridor between them. The cubicles were wrapped in milky sheet plastic, and inside, archaeologists leaned over metal tables that held bones recovered from the Beagle. Their high-pitched drills played the anthem of their painstaking work.

  The biology team was constantly frustrated with the archaeologists’ pace. They wanted the samples extracted and sequenced quickly, whereas the archaeologists insisted that preserving the integrity of the specimens was the highest priority. Lin had struck a balance between the groups, a fragile detente, but the truce didn’t stop the biologists from name-calling. The archaeologists were referred to as the polar bears—or simply “da
bears.” The archeology labs were the “polar bear cages,” arguments with them were “bear attacks,” and delivering bone samples was “feeding the bears.”

  Peyton couldn’t get the bear analogy out of her mind as she walked down the aisle, watching the white-clad figures lumbering around the cubicles, peering down to inspect the bones, then drilling deeper.

  Outside the hold, she and Lin climbed the ladders between the decks in silence. At the top, Lin spun the hatch’s wheel and charged outside. Peyton gritted her teeth as the blast of Arctic air hit her.

  The deck of the Russian icebreaker was crowded with sailors. The research personnel needed to launch the submersible stood behind them, at the rear of the vessel. The researchers called the shots on what to do, but the Russian Navy was in charge of how to do it. Like the biologists and archaeologists, there was always friction between the two groups.

  This morning was no different. The ship’s executive officer, Captain Second Rank Alexei Vasiliev, was shouting at the researchers gathered around the submersible about what he called unrealistic expectations. The massive Russian’s own crewmembers were crowded behind him, like a street gang showing their numbers.

  Lin’s lithe form cut a sharp contrast with the burly sailors as she pushed through the crowd, looking like a child wading through a lynch mob. Peyton followed on her heels, sticking close to her mother for fear that the hole she created would close and leave her trapped in the mob.

  Vasiliev stopped shouting when he saw them.

  Lin’s voice was as crisp as the frigid air around them. “Captain, can your crew support our dive schedule or not?”

  Vasiliev threw up his hands and continued shouting. His words came out in puffs of white steam, reminding Peyton of a massive engine revving up, growing louder, more and more exhaust spewing out.

  Lin turned to the research team. “Dr. Greene, inform the Alliance that the crew of the Arktika is unable to support our dive schedule, and thus we cannot complete our mission with the urgency they require.”

  Nigel nodded and broke from the pack, but Vasiliev stopped him with a meaty outstretched hand. He turned to one of his own men and grumbled in Russian. The Russian officer said something to Nigel before striding off the deck.

  When he was gone, Nigel said to Lin, “They’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  “Good.”

  Peyton watched as the entire deck plunged into frenzied activity, the researchers and Russian naval personnel rushing, bumping into each other, and arguing.

  Nigel stepped closer to Lin, his voice low, British accent thick. “Dr. Shaw, I must again press my request that you remain on the ship.”

  “No.” Lin looked away, focusing on the preparations.

  “You’re irreplaceable.” Nigel waited, then exhaled. “The risk is unnecessary.”

  “No one knows the Beagle the way I do.”

  “Perhaps. But we’ve mapped the vessel extensively. Our recovery personnel are trained—”

  “Your objection is noted, Dr. Greene. I’ve made my decision.”

  Nigel glanced at Peyton, who shrugged, silently saying, I’ve tried too.

  Peyton had begun to wonder if there was something in the wreckage her mother didn’t want anyone else to find. She couldn’t shake the sense that her mother was hiding something—and Peyton didn’t want to miss it. For that reason, she had insisted on accompanying her mother on each dive. If there was something going on that would help save lives—or help her find Desmond—she wanted to know about it.

  She also wondered if Nigel suspected something. If he did, he didn’t let on. He merely nodded and stepped away, leaving Peyton and Lin standing silently in the midst of the chaos, like statues amid a Mardi Gras procession.

  Up here on the deck, Peyton got a better appreciation of the massive Russian ship’s size. At roughly a hundred feet wide and almost two football fields long, the Arktika was the world’s largest icebreaker. Its two nuclear reactors allowed it to cut through ice thirteen feet deep, also a world’s best. Its decks were painted a shade of green that reminded Peyton of a miniature golf course, and its exterior walls and hatches were a faded red. Perhaps the designers had thought that the red and green color scheme would stand out against the Arctic ice, but to Peyton, it was a reminder of Christmas, which was less than a week away. And she couldn’t think about Christmas without thinking about Desmond—about the night they spent at Half Moon Bay, and the moment he opened the box with the heart of glass. Unconsciously, her fingers touched the object in her pants.

  She walked away from her mother, to the edge of the ship’s deck. The sheet of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean stretched into the darkness in every direction, seemingly with no end. The ship’s floodlights formed a bubble of illumination around the ship, making Peyton feel as though she were standing on the deck of a toy ship at the center of a snow globe, the world beyond shrouded.

  From the ship’s rail, Peyton could see the US Navy helicopter perched on the helo pad above. Twice her mother had asked her if she wanted to board the helo and leave the expedition. Twice, Peyton had declined. She wasn’t leaving without answers.

  Footsteps echoed on the deck behind her. Lin’s voice was quiet, less commanding now. “It’s time, Peyton.”

  Minutes later, they were diving toward the wrecked submarine.

  At the same time that Peyton and Lin’s research submersible was docking with the shipwrecked submarine on the ocean floor, a second submersible was moving closer to the Russian icebreaker Arktika. It carried a five-man team, all specially trained for the type of mission they were undertaking.

  Instead of surfacing at the Arkika’s launch platform, the submersible slowly moved along the ship’s hull. It was searching for a break in the ice—one that was the right size, and hard to see from the aft and fore decks.

  The submersible cut its forward thrust, reversed, and drifted toward the surface, stopping when it met the ice. A white tube extended vertically, rising above the water within feet of the hull. A pump at its base drained the water from the tube, the hatch at the top of the tube opened, and Lieutenant Stockton, the mission’s second in command, climbed the ladder inside.

  At the top, he placed the rover against Arktika’s hull. He drew out a control device and activated the rover’s magnet. It clung to the Russian icebreaker and began climbing, its rubber tracks silent.

  When the rover reached the deck, it extended two small arms and clamped against the metal lip. A finger-sized antenna with a glass tip rose, stopping just as it cleared the deck’s metal lip.

  On the submersible, Captain Furst, the mission commander, glanced at his watch, mentally marking the time.

  Stockton climbed back down, and the tube retracted. For the next twenty minutes, the five men inside the submersible sat in silence, watching the video footage for patrols and other details that would increase their mission’s chance of success.

  Stockton turned to Furst and tapped his Luminox timepiece.

  Furst nodded.

  Stockton and a second man strapped on their body armor, then donned Russian naval uniforms. A high-tensile cable extended from the rover. The white tube once again rose from the submersible, the water drained, and the hatch opened. It took the two specialists less than a minute to scale Arktika’s hull.

  Then they were standing on the deck, blending in with the other 140 crewmembers, ready to complete their mission: to sink the Arktika and capture or kill Lin and Peyton Shaw.

  Chapter 4

  At midnight, Conner exited the building and set out along the island path. Moonlight lit his way. Three camo-clad mercenaries followed behind him. Insects chanted out of sync, like an orchestra scoring their march.

  At the holding pen, he stopped outside the fences. Desmond lay on the cot, eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Quietly, Conner opened the outer gate. He reached in his pocket, drew out the syringe, and removed the rubber cap. Speed was key.

  He opened the inner gate and rushed toward his brother.
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  To Conner’s shock, Desmond rolled off of the cot, crouched low, and barreled forward. His shoulder connected just above Conner’s knees. He threw Conner over his back and came up swinging. His first haymaker hit the lead soldier in the face. The man flew back toward the fence, which buzzed as he convulsed.

  The other two mercenaries dove for Desmond and wrestled him to the ground. They covered him like football players piling on a fumble. Desmond rolled, trying to throw them off, but Conner was on his feet, the syringe in his hand. He forced his brother’s head into the dirt and jabbed the needle into his neck.

  I’m sorry, Des. You left me no choice.

  The two mercenaries who had subdued Desmond carried him down the ridge, using the cot as a stretcher. Conner left the unconscious soldier behind and replaced him with another. Five more mercenaries waited by the jet in the camouflaged hangar. The team leader, Major Goins, informed Conner that the cargo was loaded and that they were prepped for departure.

  The runway was a grass path that curved slightly. The jet bumped along as it gained speed, then lifted off.

  Conner settled into the seat next to Desmond, who was sedated and intubated. The final member of Conner’s team, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Simon Park, sat in the seat on the other side of Desmond, monitoring his vitals. The physician had protested at length about the plan and had brought along enough equipment and medical supplies to stock a small hospital. He wore a constant look of worry.

  Conner counted this as a good sign. People who didn’t care made more mistakes. That was why he had made sure Park knew that Desmond’s fate would be his own if anything happened.

  Six hours later, Conner stood in the cockpit, peering out the jet’s windshield at the rising sun over the mountains of the Mexican state of Baja California. Soon the ridges turned to desert, then the desert met the sea. The Mexican town of San Felipe looked tiny next to the mountains and the Gulf of California.