Ionic Attraction

by D. R. Rosensteel

  “I thought you had a foolproof extraction plan.”

  Jane raised an eyebrow. “I’m a perfectionist. Do you not know that by now?”

  “I’m a slow learner.”

  “Try harder.” Jane smiled.

  Zach smiled back. “Pull up the Astronomy Building on the simulator. Let’s look at the fourth floor.”

  “There’s nothing to see.” Jane tapped the arm of her chair and the structure materialized in front of them. “I told you, we don’t have intel on that floor.”

  “Maybe not, but we have two amazing hackers and the world’s most powerful computer right down the hall.” Zach got up and walked to the hologram. “Can you switch to the floor plan view?”

  Jane tapped, and the holo changed into a schematic of the entire building. The fourth floor was a dark cuboid.

  “Hovervator ports on every floor. Can’t tell if the fourth floor has one. But look, there’s a single stairwell that runs from the bottom floor to the top of the building. And then there’s this little one.” Zach pointed to a narrow staircase between the fourth and fifth floors. “Why?”

  “I never noticed that before.” Jane got out of her chair and stood next to Zach. “Isn’t it odd to have a separate stairway that connects only two floors?”

  “Something’s weird.” Zach reached out to touch the fifth floor. His hand disappeared inside the hologram. “See how the main stairway has a door on every floor? But I don’t see a doorway to the fourth floor. It bypasses and goes directly to the fifth. There’s no way to get to the fourth floor from below. Do you know what that means?”

  “Fourth floor access is possible only from here.” Jane pointed to a small room on the fifth floor. “The extra stairwell opens in this room.”

  “The only way in or out is from the little room on the fifth floor. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “But I don’t see how that’s helpful. We still don’t know the fourth-floor layout.”

  Zach thought for a moment. “Pull up the building’s wiring diagrams.”

  “I don’t see how that will help,” Jane said.

  “We can use them to create a floor plan for the fourth floor. The wires will be run along the inside of the walls and ceiling. They’ll look like a map of the entire floor. We can see how many rooms there are, how they’re laid out…and we’ll know how to get in and out.”

  Jane tapped at the control then shook her head. “We don’t have the wiring diagrams.”

  “They should be public record. Part of the building plans.”

  “I’m positive they aren’t public. They’ll be locked up tight.”

  Zach smiled. “Did you forget that we have two amazing hackers right down the hall?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jane

  “That was awesome, Dad. And unexpected.” Jane sat on the living room sofa with her father after they had dinner together. The first in a long time. The lights were dim, and the room was warm and comfortable, just like her dad’s office at the Complex. He had surprised her by having dinner ready when she got home. Cheeseburgers and french fries! “I thought you left work early for a meeting. What’s going on?”

  It was unusual to see her father acting so…fatherly. James Parker’s “normal” was distant, aloof, always with matters of national security on his mind, even at home. Jane took a remote third or fourth place, when she placed at all.

  “I’m allowed to pamper my only child once in a while. I can’t do it at the Mastermind Complex, but nobody is watching when we’re home. I have a break at the moment and wanted to spend some time together.”

  Their apartment was in the residential section of Quantum City, in a building that had been in her father’s family for generations, according to public records. Jane didn’t know if that was true or not. Those same records also said he had no children. Acting as though he did was a nice experience for her.

  “I could get used to it.” Jane let herself sink into the sofa. The living room was homey, with hardwood floors, thick throw rugs, and candles burning on the fireplace mantel. A ceiling fan turned slowly above her. The air smelled like vanilla. “I wish it was like this at the Complex. I hate calling you Mr. Parker.”

  “It’s necessary, honey,” her dad said. “What else would the youngest intelligence officer in an anti-terrorist organization call her supervisor? We don’t act like coworkers at the Complex simply to appear professional. You know how many enemies I’ve made since ORDER was formed. And you also know that the only saving grace is they don’t know who I am. Or you. To the outside world, Dr. James Parker is a lowly administrator in an office full of administrators, and Jane Lew is a student at the Mastermind Complex’s private school, along with hundreds of others. It’s how I keep us safe.”

  “I know. That, and teaching me how to punch out people like Benson Graham.”

  “I wish I had seen that.”

  “Better that you didn’t. You almost blew your cover over it.”

  Her father snorted. “It would have been worth it to have that judge thrown off the bench and into a cell next to Benson. I wish you hadn’t talked me out of it, but you saw connections I missed.”

  “Were you seriously going to resign from ORDER?”

  “Absolutely. When Benson kidnapped you, all I could think about was the day I pulled you out of that building.” His eyes narrowed like they did in the meeting when Jane described the Benson incident. “You were sixteen months old, but the image is still so fresh in my mind all these years later. Every time I see the scar on your forehead, I go back to that day.”

  Jane touched the awful scar that she kept so carefully hidden beneath her bangs—not always successfully, it seemed. Zachary saw it. She shook off the embarrassing memory. “I don’t remember the building, Dad. I don’t even know how I got this scar, because you change the subject every time I bring it up. You never talk about it.”

  “I hate even thinking about it.” His voice wavered. “Maybe it’s time I did. You’re old enough. I know you have questions.”

  “I’m listening.” Jane’s heart sped up. She knew next to nothing about her past. She had no memory of any family but his. She loved her cousins and aunts and uncles, but even they couldn’t fill a hole inside her that she couldn’t put words to. She had come from somewhere. But where?

  “I really should be grateful,” Dad said quietly. “The explosion that destroyed the Kinematics Building changed my whole life. It was terrible, but it was wonderful. The terrorists knew what they were doing. There should have been no survivors. I was at the lowest I had ever been, pulling out bodies so badly burned that I wasn’t even sure they were human. Then I found you.”

  “I was the first survivor you found?”

  “You were the only survivor.”

  Jane took a slow breath. The pain on her dad’s face… No wonder he never talked about it. But she had questions that deserved answers. “Is that how my parents died?”

  “Yes. Your DNA was matched to the remains of two of the victims.”

  Questions he always avoided. “Who were they? Do I have another name?”

  Her dad shook his head and stared off into space. “They were so badly burned. Unrecognizable. No fingerprints. Dental records were useless. There was no way to identify the bodies. I tried. I used every resource I had but couldn’t find any record of them. I learned the identity of every other victim, but not the two who matched you. The only thing I’m certain of is that your parents were undocumented. I think you were born in China. Hubei province.”

  “How do you know?”

  “DNA results. I traced your ancestry.”

  Jane felt herself going numb. She shouldn’t have asked. Maybe this was why her dad never talked about it. “I’m nobody. I don’t even have a real name.”

  He moved closer and put his arm around her. “Don’t say that, Janie. You are s
omebody. Somebody who is very special to me.”

  “I’m not your real daughter. I don’t have your blood. I don’t even have your name.”

  He squeezed her into a warm hug. “You have my heart. You are as much my daughter as if I had been your biological father. I fell in love with you the instant I found you. I started the adoption process that day.”

  Jane leaned in to her dad. Deep down, she knew what he said was true. She just… “I wish it could be like this every day. Why do we have to be such stick-in-the-muds at the Complex?”

  He laughed. “So nobody connects us to ORDER.”

  “But why can’t they connect me to you?”

  The laugh stopped short, and her dad’s face became deadly serious. “Mamont is watching. He suspects that something like ORDER exists. It’s only a matter of time before he starts to suspect me. And I will not risk my only daughter’s life with a man like him.

  “Eight weeks after your adoption was finalized, the President asked me to start ORDER. She warned me of the danger, especially now that I had a child, and said she’d understand if I declined. Raising a daughter and operating a multi-billion-dollar anti-terrorist organization—I needed to run ORDER to feel like I was doing something for the world, but I needed you to make me feel like the world was worth doing something for. It made sense at the time to do both.

  “The day Benson took you, though, it stopped making sense. I’d never been so frightened in my life. Even having different names didn’t keep you safe. How much worse would it be if they knew we were family?”

  “Benson was no big deal.” That was the first time Jane had ever heard her dad admit to being scared. She didn’t realize he even felt that emotion. Until this moment, she had forgotten that he felt any emotion.

  Her dad looked straight into her eyes. “He was to me.”

  Jane suddenly felt warm, like she had found a loved one who’d been lost, like she was witnessing his homecoming. Before Benson, she remembered feeling this way all the time. The Benson ordeal had taken her dad away from her.

  She kissed his cheek. “I wasn’t enamored by the whole abduction thing, either, but it was the breakthrough we needed. If Benson hadn’t kidnapped me, we still wouldn’t know that the Young PhD Program is a front for Mamont’s terrorist activities. We’re onto him now. We can finally take him down. Unless you’d still prefer to send me off to stay with Grandma.”

  “Okay, that was a bad idea. You’d be bored out of your mind in Montana.” He sighed and leaned back. “Maybe I’ll turn Zachary loose on Benson. He seems to have grown protective of you.”

  She couldn’t deny it. “That’s good, right?”

  He gave a noncommittal shrug. “I still don’t like him.”

  Jane thought she might be starting to. She really liked being around Zachary. But she wasn’t about to admit that to Dad. “He’s not as bad as I expected. He’s got rough edges. I wonder what he was like before prison.”

  “Highly regarded in the science community. He wrote that very impressive paper on the forces of geomagnetism. You know the one.”

  She did. The one that sent Zachary to prison, with her help. A high-tech device had been stolen, and police came to the Mastermind Complex for help. Their questions were completely understandable.

  Who could use such a thing?

  Who would even know what it was?

  Why would they risk breaking into a high-security area to take it?

  Eager to help, Jane had used LYDIA to learn if anyone outside the major scientific institutions was capable. No matter the search criteria, Zachary Keen was the only name that came up. The paper he published described how he could theoretically reconfigure a quark detector to build a quark generator.

  Dad frowned. “I’m afraid that paper brought Piper Dane to the Detention Center.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Zachary said he knew her, I thought that Mamont had focused his recruiting efforts on young prisoners. But now I’m afraid that he may have targeted Zachary specifically.”

  Jane inhaled sharply. “For what?”

  “Think about why Zachary was sent to prison.”

  She knew the charges all too well. “A high-security government building was broken into and a rare quark detector stolen. The data I gave to police led them to Zachary. His computer was confiscated, and they found cleverly hidden photos of the building, the security entry code, and the secret location where the quark detector was stored. You and I both know it was all planted. They never found the detector in Zachary’s possession, but the evidence was enough to convict him to a two-year stint in the Quantum City Detention Center for Juvenile Offenders.”

  “The police must have gone straight from here to Quantum City University with the same questions.” Her father took a deep breath. “After all, we’re not the only ones capable of doing a search like that.”

  Suddenly, Jane saw the connection. That was her gift, and sometimes it felt like magic. “HAVOC planned to build a proton cannon even then. The police went to Mamont after I gave them Zachary’s name.”

  “And they gave his name to Mamont. Another teen genius to add to his collection.”

  Jane took a deep, labored breath.

  Her dad caressed her cheek. “I know what you’re thinking. Stop beating yourself up. You had no idea this would happen. Neither of us did.”

  Jane pressed her dad’s hand against her face. “I didn’t just put Zachary in jail. I put him in Mamont’s crosshairs. What will I do?”

  Dad let out a long, drawn-out sigh. “I think it’s time we had the talk.”

  Jane sat up straight. “Umm, no. We’ve already had it. And I didn’t like it the first time. What does that have to do with anything?”

  Dad laughed. “Not that talk. Good God, I hated it, too.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Jane slumped back into the sofa.

  “No, I mean the talk about walking a fine balance in this business. The world is full of betrayal, Jane. You know that firsthand.”

  She did. She slumped farther into the sofa.

  “Think about this. How did you feel when you learned the truth about Benson?”

  Jane didn’t have to think about it. She instantly flushed, the anger burning in her cheeks. “I hated him. I never wanted to see him again. Even the thought of his face made me want to spit nails. Still does.”

  “This mission is critical. I don’t have to tell you.” Dad put his hand on hers. “We can plan on betrayal from HAVOC. Piper Dane will betray Zachary the second he’s no longer useful to her.”

  “That’s why our extraction plan is so important.” Jane thought about the bugs in it. “I think we need to push Plan B harder. It needs to be ready.”

  Dad nodded. “I think there’s another detail we need to take care of first.”

  “Such as?”

  “Zachary trusts you, Jane. I can see it. That’s not an easy thing for him, given his history. But you feel like you’ve betrayed him, no matter how often I tell you the opposite.”

  “Dad, he went to jail because of me. My testimony.”

  “Which is public record. The boy is sharp. So are his brothers. I’ve been watching them. They’ve used LYDIA for some interesting research. Unrelated to this mission.”

  Jane’s back stiffened and her breath became tight. “He knows? Oh, Dad, this is awful! He’ll never trust me again. And the mission… It will be ruined. If he already feels betrayed, he’ll never go in.”

  “They haven’t found anything yet. He doesn’t know.”

  Jane let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God. I have to talk to Anna. She can lock the transcripts. Dad, he can never find out. There’s too much at stake.”

  “Yes, there is.” Her dad put his arm around her. “That’s exactly why you have to tell him before he finds out on his own.”

  “Tha
t’s the fine balance you were talking about? The balance between keeping my sanity and losing it?”

  “The balance between keeping secrets and telling the truth. Keeping secrets destroys trust,” Dad said quietly. “But confiding in someone, letting them in on a secret with stakes that are higher than they can imagine…well, few things build a stronger sense of trust.”

  “So I should tell him what I did?”

  He slowly shook his head. “You should tell him who I am.”

  Jane jolted upright. “Dad, are you out—”

  He held his hand up to silence her. “Think about it.”

  Jane was so completely and absolutely confused that she was momentarily at a loss for words. “I had to cut my hair. I have to ride a bus instead of coming home with you. I can’t even call you Dad when the cameras are off in the most secure room in the world. I—”

  “Do you trust him?”

  That stopped her short. Did she trust him? “I think so. I mean, I’m getting to know him very well. He can be a butthead, but I think his heart is in the right place.”

  “But?” Dad was staring right into Jane’s eyes.

  She saw where he was going. “But I have a history of being too trusting. Okay, I get it. This was a test. I pass. I don’t know Zachary well enough to know if he can be trusted with our secret. I won’t tell him you’re my dad. Honestly, though, were you really afraid I would?”

  “No, Jane, I never thought for a second that you would.” Dad took her hand. “This was no test. I’ve made a career of reading people. I trust no one. But I’ve been watching Zachary Keen very closely. He is a unique young man. Higher level of integrity than I have seen in most adults. Telling him our secret will build a bond between you that HAVOC will never be able to break.”