Luca yanked the glasses off, trying to catch her breath. Any doubts about her complicity in Markov’s death vanished. She was responsible. She was the leak.
She looked around the coffee shop, expecting to see armed police men advancing on her. A couple tangled together in an overstuffed leather chair, a student who looked vaguely familiar lost in his data glasses, and an older gentleman in an overcoat reading a tablet while he sipped his coffee. His eyes flicked up to meet hers, then dropped back to what he was reading.
Luca donned her glasses again and deleted Magdalena’s message, then gathered her things and exited the shop. Charged with adrenalin, her senses screamed at every detail. The ankle-deep snow muffled the city sounds around her. Her shoes were soaked from the first step on the sidewalk.
“Oh, do be careful, dear,” said a woman walking her dog. “It’s very slippery.”
Luca stopped in her tracks. She’d forgotten to feed the animals and she’d failed to call Vet Med. Now it was closed for the weekend, leaving the animals stranded in the dungeon.
She slogged through the heavy snow back to Foyle Hall. Brushing away nagging feelings of dread, she descended the stairs to find the too-big guard in the too-small uniform still on duty.
“What are you doing back here?” His attitude had not improved over the course of the day .
“I’m here to feed the animals,” she said. “Jules told me to.”
He scowled at her. “Make it fast.”
Her footsteps echoed in the shadowy, half-deconstructed lab. The rats chittered when she turned on the light. They weren’t used to night visitors. Leroy whined inside his crate, and Luis half-stood and stretched to greet her.
“I promise I’ll feed you guys as soon as we get home,” she said.
Home? But what choice did she have? Vet Med was closed, and someone had to take care of them for the weekend.
Luca packed food for each animal in her backpack, then placed the rats and cat into their carriers. When she put on Leroy’s leash, his tail wagged with excitement at the prospect of a walk. Slinging the backpack over her shoulder, she loaded up Luis’s larger crate in one hand and the two rats’ shared smaller one in the other. Leroy’s nails clicked on the linoleum floor as he led the way through the darkened lab.
The security guard looked up when they walked into the foyer. He put out a hand to stop her. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m taking the animals home.” Luca decided her best course of action was to act like she knew what she was doing. “Unless you want to feed them and clean their cages all weekend.”
“I dunno,” he said. “They’re wearing proprietary tech. I don’t think you’re supposed to be…” He stopped speaking, his pupils dilating like Jules’s had that morning. His head cocked before his gaze fastened on Luca again. “Put the animals back.”
She tried to stand her ground. “It’s okay. I do this all the time. ”
The gorilla-guard advanced. Luca took a step back, laden with the animal cages.
“I said, put them back.”
She continued retreating into the dark lab. His bulk filled the doorway, blocking the light. “I was supposed to call Vet Med, but I forgot. This way, I can care for—”
“Put them back!”
His body spasmed, jerking upright, then crumpling to the cold linoleum floor. Electrode darts made a pattern in his back. A lithe black woman with a shaved head stood in the doorway, a stun gun in her fist.
“Luca, are you okay?”
Leroy growled.
Luca blinked, not believing her eyes. “Hannah?”
Jansen nodded. “We have to hurry. Here, give me the cat.” Luca handed Luis’s cage to her without thinking twice. It felt natural. In exchange, Jansen handed her a Wi-Fi Microdrive.
“I want you to sync this up with Markov’s personal terminal and download everything you can. Then you’re coming with me. I have people picking up your sister.”
“You want the data? You—you have Donna?” Luca repeated, trying to grasp the meaning of her words. The man on the floor twitched. “Wait … you killed Markov…”
“No, Diana,” she said carefully, deliberately. “We tried to protect him, but we failed.”
“Diana…” How did Hannah know her avatar name from the Portal? The light dawned. “You’re Magdalena.”
Jansen smiled.
Her earlier fears drained away, replaced by a calm security .
“It’s the Neos, isn’t it?” Luca said. “Everything they’re saying in the Portal is true.”
“I’ll explain, I promise,” Jansen said. She gripped Luca’s shoulder. “But we have to go. And we need that data.”
“I’ll have to sign in as myself. They’ll know.”
“It won’t matter. You’re not coming back here.”
Luca blinked, wondering what that meant. For her and her little sister. “We can take the animals with us?” she asked.
“I’m counting on it. You’ll need them to help Donna.”
Luca exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Hannah would take care of them. Hannah would protect them.
Help Donna. Now that would be the best Christmas present of all.
Chapter 9
William Graves • Haven 6, Blue Earth, Minnesota
Graves had outfitted a makeshift secure room in the oversized closet next to his office. After installing the shielding for a Faraday cage along the walls and a small generator to power the jamming field, there was just enough room for two chairs facing one another.
The space lacked ventilation, but Graves decided to prioritize security over comfort. As a result, he normally stripped down to his T-shirt before entering the “hotbox,” as he liked to call it, and he kept the meetings as short as possible.
Jansen sat across from him, similarly attired, their knees almost touching. A sheen of sweat gleamed on her dark brow. His head throbbed, a side effect of the New Year’s Eve party the previous evening.
“We lost Markov, sir,” she said.
Graves cursed. Markov had been the furthest along of three covertly funded research efforts aimed at understanding how Cassandra controlled the Neos. Figuring out how to disrupt their communications would have been his next step.
“Well, if he hadn’t been close, they wouldn’t have risked offing him so publicly,” Jansen said.
“That’s a hell of a silver lining, Hannah,” Graves said. But Jansen was right. Their ham-handed murder of Markov spoke of an emotional reaction, not a strategic one. “You really think Markov’s lab assistant can finish his work?”
“No one knows his research better.”
Graves detected a note of hesitation in the captain’s demeanor. “What is it?”
“Well, sir, Luca Vasquez is complicated. I guess that’s the best way to describe her.” She waited for Graves to indicate he wanted more, then plunged ahead. “Recent immigrant on a student visa, but she has a younger sister, Donna, who’s implanted. We have Donna under sedation, of course. Luca damn near got herself killed trying to smuggle the test animals out of the lab. She’s got guts, I’ll give her that.”
“And she has a personal motivation: the sister,” Graves said. “Put her in the lab with the guy from UCLA. Same deal. You figure out how to disconnect all these people from Cassandra and you get a free ride to a new world.”
“The sister too?”
Graves eyed her. “Eventually, our scientists are going to need human test subjects, right? The sister too.”
He wiped his brow with his forearm. After a few sessions like this one, the tiny space had the sour ripeness of a locker room. Across from him, he could see sweat soaking through the underarms on Jansen’s shirt.
“How’s the housecleaning going?” Graves asked, anxious to tick off items from the agenda in his pulsing head. Since they’d come to suspect the capability of the Neos, Graves had slowly been sidelining any key personnel who were marked with Cassandra’s tag. It had to be done carefu
lly, by moving them into new jobs of equal responsibility but outside the Haven project.
“Complete. The command staff is clean. I can’t guarantee the other six Haven sites, but your staff here is clean.”
She left the obvious flaw in Graves’s plan unspoken. If they didn’t find a way to break the Neo implant connection, everything would be revealed once Graves used the Havens as they were intended. Even now, he doubted this enormous structure could fly, much less travel to a distant planet, but that part was beyond his control. Whatever they had going on past the airlock on deck 36 was not his responsibility. Yet.
Jansen cleared her throat.
“Something to add, Hannah?”
“At the risk of beating a dead horse, sir—what are we going to do with Remy Cade?”
Graves scrubbed the side of his jaw with his fingernails. He was starting to smell himself now, and not in a good way.
“You have a recommendation?”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t have a tattoo, so as far as we know, he’s clean. And he wants to talk to you. In fact, that’s damned near all he says: ‘I want to see Graves.’ He was seriously injured. Almost died, in fact. Shot by his own man, so that gives him some credibility.”
“Bring him in.”
Jansen sat back in her chair. “Here, sir? I didn’t mean—”
“See if Ms. Vasquez can develop a more thorough test, but you say he’s clean, no implant, which means he’s either a defector or a double agent. Let’s figure out which one we’re dealing with.”
Graves stood, and a wave of body odor rose with him. A bass drum beat loudly inside his skull.
“Now if you’ll excuse me, Captain, I have an appointment with the president and I seriously need a shower first.”
• • •
The sight of Washington, DC, from the air still put a lump in Graves’s throat. Yeah, it was old-fashioned. Nobody really professed to be a patriot anymore, but to him, these symbols of America still mattered.
The aircar swung around on its final approach. The Capitol dome and the White House glared at each other from opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Beyond the levees, the Potomac surged around the District of Columbia, a muddy brown worm gorged on eroding soil.
A decade ago, the Washington establishment had given serious consideration to moving the US capital inland, but that movement fizzled. Everyone liked the idea of moving the capital, but everyone also had their own take on where it should be moved. Not surprisingly, every member of Congress favored their own district, and in the absence of a clear and present danger to the capital—no monuments or institutions had yet tumbled over—the status quo prevailed.
Graves’s young pilot apparently fancied himself a bit of a hotshot behind the wheel. He flared the landing with a touch more power than was necessary and dropped the front pad of the aircar with an authoritative thunk onto the White House macadam .
“Let’s keep it less showy next time, Lieutenant,” Graves called.
The back of the young man’s neck reddened. “Yes, sir. My first trip to the White House. Got a little carried away.”
Graves scowled, more for show than out of real annoyance. “Give me a minute, Lieutenant.”
The young man climbed out of the cockpit, leaving Graves alone with his thoughts.
He wasn’t nervous about seeing the president. He’d long ago shed his sense of wonder about the people in high places. His interactions over the past year had taught him they were just people. Usually trying to do the right thing, sometimes for the wrong reasons, and sometimes with disastrous results.
But the secrets. That was the part that bothered him most. Graves would gladly trade his colonel’s silver eagles for the gold bars of a lowly second lieutenant right now to avoid the compartmentalized mess his life had become. He knocked on the window to signal the pilot to open the door.
Graves stood, squared his shoulders, and set his beret on his head at the regulation angle. He was off to lie to the President of the United States.
All in a day’s work, he told himself. You do what you have to do to help the most people.
The marine guard on the door popped a sharp salute, and Graves returned it. Inside, Helena Telemachus waited for him, dressed in a dark blue suit and skinny tie.
He offered her a shallow smile. “You didn’t have to dress up for me, Helena.” He addressed her by her full first name, knowing how it would bother her. Petty, but Graves was past caring .
H smirked back at him. “He’s waiting.” She set off with a long stride that forced Graves to double-time to keep up with her.
“Do we have an agenda?” Graves said to the back of her head. One did not refuse a summons to the White House, but the White House did not always deign to offer a reason for the summons.
“Not here,” she muttered back, popping two sharp raps on the door to the Oval Office before entering.
Teller rose from behind the Resolute desk. Teller was a history buff and he’d made a news cycle out of moving the historic desk, fashioned from the British Arctic exploration ship, from the Smithsonian back into the Oval Office.
Smiling broadly, the president advanced, hand extended. Graves took it, studying Teller’s face for any sign of what might be heading his way. Despite the micro-cosmetic treatments, Graves detected a new spray of worry lines around the president’s eyes. With his second swearing-in only a few weeks away, Graves could only imagine how old he would appear four years from now. Assuming he wasn’t crucified by the United Nations before then. Or Russia and China declared war.
Teller’s smile felt genuine and his handshake warm, but Graves knew better than to judge this man based on those factors. He was dealing with a world-class political animal, a man who could change his skin faster than a chameleon in a kaleidoscope.
“Mr. President,” was all Graves said.
“Sit, sit.” Teller waved at the couches Graves had seen in media stories so many times. The striped cushions were firm, forcing an upright posture. He accepted an unsolicited cup of coffee from H and set it down on the table between them.
“Tell me about Haven,” Teller said without prelude. His face was open, patient.
Graves froze. Did Teller know about the true nature of the project? He picked up his coffee again to stall for time, then set it down. H was watching him with narrowed eyes.
“Logistics are ninety percent complete, sir,” Graves said, recounting the most innocuous details from Jansen’s last report. He spoke slowly, pretending a need to recall the information. “The last ten percent is the hardest in any project, of course. But I expect to be fully supplied and ready to seal the dome within the next thirty days.”
“How many can you take inside each dome?” Teller asked.
“Three thousand apiece, sir, including staff.”
The president’s posture sagged. “Seven Havens. Twenty-one thousand people. Half a billion people in this country, and the best we can do is save twenty-one thousand. That’s pathetic.”
Graves said nothing. Teller rose and began pacing, punching his fist into an open palm as he walked.
“I don’t need to tell you that we’re in the shit here, Graves. The UN is going to come after me again, and you’re no doubt aware of the attacks on the US bases overseas. First, the New Earthers attack our overseas bases. Now, I’ve got the Russians and Chinese on my ass. If they rattle their sabers any louder, we’ll need earplugs.”
Graves shared a look with H. Her expression was inscrutable.
“Haven in its present form is a defensive play,” the president continued. “We’re just burying people in the ground and hoping things get better. I refuse to sit here and let innocent Americans die. We need to take action.” He drove his fist into his palm one last time, then spun on his heel to face Graves. “That’s where you come in, General.”
The president stared hard at Graves, waiting for a reaction. H cleared her throat.
Wait … the President of the United States just called him a�
�
Teller handed him a small velvet box. Graves opened it to find two silver stars, the insignia of a brigadier general. He looked up at Teller in disbelief. “Sir, I don’t know what to say.”
Teller’s grin was grim. “Oh, don’t thank me yet. You haven’t heard what your new job is.”
Graves pried his eyes away from the box in his hand. “New job, sir?”
“Brigadier General William Graves, you are in charge of the newly formed CONUS RELOCOMM.”
Graves stared at the commander in chief, who’d just pole-vaulted him over a number of other, grayer heads in the command structure. “Continental United States Relocation Command? We already have units providing shelter and food to inland migrants, sir.”
“Surely you can see we’re beyond that, Graves. Think bigger.” Teller returned to his seat. “I need you to save people. When the history books talk about Howard Teller III, I want Lazarus to be an unfortunate footnote to the story of the man who saved humanity. Look at those stars and that field of black velvet they’re sitting on.” He waited a moment until Graves obeyed. “That’s not just a symbol of your new rank, General. That’s a symbol of your new job. The Moon, Mars, wherever we can set up a colony. Save people, man. Save Americans.”
The room fell silent. Even H gave the moment the respect it deserved. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner seemed anxious for Graves to answer.
Teller leaned forward, hands clasped together, gaze intense. “They still teach Dunkirk at West Point?”
“Of course, sir,” Graves replied.
“When the British army was pinned on the beaches of northern France, the ocean at their back and the Germans breathing down their neck, Churchill didn’t give up. He knew if he lost those soldiers, there was nothing stopping Hitler from taking Britain. The entire history of Western civilization would have been different. So, what did he do?”
“He rallied,” Graves said.
“Exactly. The English requisitioned anything that would float—private yachts, fishing boats, anything—and sent them across the Channel. Saved more than three hundred thousand soldiers when it seemed all was lost.” He stared Graves down. “I am the Churchill of our time, and we are going to save as many Americans as we can. I need you with me on this journey, General.”
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