“Listen to me, all of you. Don’t you get it? If we don’t start working together, we’ll all be screwed.”
What are you doing?
She ignored the voice—the teacher’s voice, her voice. “The world is about to come apart. I can stop it, but I can’t do it alone.”
Stop it? Why?
Cort was the first to shrug off the shout-induced paralysis. “And just how are you going to do that?”
You can’t tell them.
A lump of shame rose into her throat. Was she really going to do this? Betray everything she believed in just to save her own skin?
No! The rebuttal was so forceful, she thought for a moment that she had spoken it aloud. These aren’t my beliefs. Just something planted in my head by someone who doesn’t give a damn about me or anyone that I love.
They don’t love you, insisted the voice. They fear you. They will kill you.
No! She had to grind her teeth together to keep from shouting it. It’s not true.
And it wasn’t. What had Noah just said?
She is my daughter.
Despite everything he knew about her—things she probably didn’t even know herself—he meant it.
That was real. That was the truth.
And he is my father, Jenna thought. Despite everything she knew about him—the lies he had told, the people he had killed—the realization filled her with a joy that was even more powerful than the guilt of her implanted memories.
She unclenched her jaw. “Everything that’s been happening is just the set-up. There’s something even worse coming.”
Cort nodded impatiently. “You’ve already said that.”
“I know, but something has to happen first.”
They will kill you. Then they will destroy everything. Humanity is the cancer that must be eliminated, or everything will be destroyed. You must not interfere.
“The last part of the transmission, the part that contains the trigger, also has instructions. Before the final phase can begin, someone has to send a message back. It’s a signal that the final attack is about to start. Maybe it’s to let them know so they can send their invasion forces.” The last part was conjecture, but it made sense.
“How do you know that hasn’t already happened?”
“There’s a time-table for it.” She reached for the memory but it wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly, she felt faint and staggered to a nearby desk for support. “Damn.”
“Jenna?” Noah asked, then he returned his attention to Cort. “Tell your men to stand down, damn it. Guns on the ground.”
Cort glowered but nodded to Trace and the others. Only when the guns were put away did Noah step away from Cort. “Jenna, what’s wrong?”
“It’s gone,” she said, suddenly feeling helpless again. “Access denied.”
“A fail-safe,” Soter murmured, breaking his long silence. His voice sounded hollow, defeated. Jenna’s explanation had stripped away his illusions and revealed his duplicity in what looked very much like a bid by an alien intelligence to exterminate humankind. “A defense mechanism in the genetic memory to prevent you from turning against the programming.”
Jenna had to fight to catch her breath. What if there were other fail-safe mechanisms? Would all her memories slip away, leaving her a gibbering idiot, or worse, a brain-dead vegetable? Was she going to drop dead of a brain aneurism? “I can’t remember when. I just remember that it’s happening soon. Today, I think.”
“Today?” Cort scoffed. “That’s convenient.”
“It makes sense,” Noah countered. “It explains the escalation. You know it’s true. That’s why the agency panicked and authorized the sanction against us.”
Cort let that go without comment. “Well if you can’t remember anything about this signal, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to help stop it.”
“Wait. The message is in the transmission. We still have that.”
Soter shook his head. “But we still can’t decipher it.”
“I can.” She looked to Cort, asking for permission, but also asking for his trust.
Cort frowned, and for a moment, Jenna thought he was going to further ridicule her, but then he nodded. “Do it.”
The atmosphere in the room shifted. As Jenna took a seat in front of the computer, the others gathered behind her. Soter was poised over her shoulder. Mercy stood beside him, and Noah was beside her, so close that the events of the last two days seemed like a bad dream. Cort’s presence ruined the illusion, but he too seemed eager to see what Jenna would reveal.
The computer monitor still showed the final sequence of the message. It no longer confounded Jenna’s perceptions, but neither did its meaning become instantly apparent. “It’s encrypted,” she said. “The code is fairly simple. Each of these strings are individual numbers, like in the Wow! Signal, but they’ve been modified with a changing mathematical value.”
She didn’t know if she was explaining it correctly. Code-breaking was not a skill that Noah had taught her. Nevertheless, she faintly recalled the structure of the code. “It’s like those puzzles where you substitute a number for a letter, but the key changes with each number.”
“How does it change?” Soter asked, his earlier dejection replaced by an almost childlike enthusiasm. “What’s the progression?”
Jenna searched her memory. The answer was still there, she could feel it. “It keeps increasing,” she said slowly, as if stalling for time. “But always at a constant rate.”
“A mathematical progression? Logarithmic? Prime numbers?” Soter’s tone was becoming strident. “Think girl. What’s the pattern?”
Something familiar. A face remembered, a name forgotten. “Spiral?”
“Like the Golden Ratio?”
Jenna’s recall of that subject was picture perfect. The Golden Ratio—approximately 1.618, also called phi—was one of those remarkable examples of mathematical perfection in nature. She had learned about it in both math and art classes. It described the perfect spiral in conch shells and pine cones, and had been employed in both art and architecture for thousands of years. It was also, Jenna recalled, the exact ratio found in the Fibonacci sequence where each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 and so forth.
“That’s it! It uses the Fibonacci sequence. The first value is unchanged. The second and third increase by one, then two, and so on.”
Soter laid a hand on her shoulder. “May I?”
Jenna vacated the seat, and the older man took her place. He opened a new program and began typing, his fingers flying across the keys as if inspired. It took him just a few minutes to write a translation algorithm, after which he cut and pasted in the binary sequence.
Jenna held her breath as the start of a now all-too familiar phrase appeared.
This is th…
The rest was a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, but Jenna knew that she had been right about the key to the cipher. “It resets to zero after ten characters.”
Soter nodded. “That makes sense. If the progression continued to follow the Fibonacci sequence, it would run to more than twelve places.” He made a quick adjustment, and then he ran the program again.
“‘This is the way the world ends,’” Noah read aloud. “‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ That’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot.”
Jenna flashed him a smile. Noah, it seemed, could still surprise her.
Cort harrumphed. “I’m supposed to believe that these aliens of yours are English lit majors?”
Soter shrugged. “I didn’t just make this up. It’s been clear from the start that the intelligence behind this understood our capabilities. They would certainly be familiar with our works of art.”
“I think the poem is part of the trigger,” Jenna added. “Like a hypnotist might use.”
Cort rolled his eyes, but said nothing more.
The rest of the message was mostly numbers, but Jenna felt certain that Soter’s program had correctly unl
ocked it. “Those are coordinates.” She recalled the emergency letter Noah had left for her. “Somewhere in the Southwest. New Mexico or Arizona.”
Soter recognized the rest of it. “I think this sequence is a Julian date. And I’d recognize these numbers anywhere. That’s the location of the Chi Sagittarii stellar group, where the Wow! Signal originated and this—1420—is the original frequency, the hydrogen line.”
He turned his chair to face Cort. “The VLA radio telescope is in Socorro, New Mexico.”
As she read it, Jenna felt her memory of the message stirring, but the voice remained silent. “That’s where we have to go. Someone—one of the clones—is going to send a signal into space. To those coordinates.”
Cort nodded slowly. “You said there’s a date?”
“A date and time,” Soter replied. He seemed suddenly ill-at-ease.
“When?”
He swallowed. “Midnight tonight.”
“Well that’s freakin’ wonderful,” Cort grumbled.
Something in Soter’s manner set alarm bells ringing in Jenna’s head. “You already knew this was going to happen today.”
Soter refused to meet her gaze. “For years, there was talk among the children of something important related to this date.”
“You knew,” Jenna repeated. There was no accusation in her tone. “That’s the real reason you sent Cray to get me, isn’t it? The deadline had arrived and you still didn’t know what the message meant.”
His silence was answer enough.
“So,” Cort said after a pause. “At midnight, something is going to happen at this place in New Mexico. We’ll get somebody there and shut the place down.”
Soter shook his head. “Julian dates start at noon Greenwich Mean Time. The date/time indicated in the message is midnight GMT. Eight hours from now.”
“I need to be there,” Jenna said.
“That’s not going to happen,” Cort declared, making a cutting gesture with his hand. “The only way you’re leaving here is in my custody.”
“Like hell,” Noah growled, raising the pistol again. The other agents tensed but did not go for their grounded weapons.
Cort waved them off but kept his attention on Noah. “If you try to leave any other way, you will be hunted down. Even you aren’t that good.”
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we.” Noah turned to the others. “Jenna, Mercy, we’re going.”
Soter stepped forward. “Take me. I have a plane waiting on the tarmac at the Arecibo Airport. It could get us to New Mexico with time to spare.”
Noah stared back, his face an unreadable mask. “You heard what the man said. They’re going to be hunting us. You sure you want to take that chance?”
The mathematician nodded soberly.
“The more the merrier,” Noah muttered. “Mercy, be a dear and collect those guns. And while I’m thinking about it, let’s have your phones. If you’re going to be hunting us, it only seems fair to give us a head start.”
Cort signaled for his men to comply, this time without threats or taunts. Jenna understood that they were past that stage now. Noah was not going to change his mind, and Cort was already thinking ahead to what he would do next. Jenna realized with sick certainty that the running and fighting was not over, not by a long shot, but now there was a lot more at stake than just her own survival.
She moved closer to Noah. “There’s no way we can make it to New Mexico without Cort’s help.”
Noah glanced in Cort’s direction before answering in a low whisper that only she could hear. “We aren’t going to New Mexico, but Cort doesn’t need to know that. I know a guy that can get us to Cuba. They won’t be able to touch us there.”
“No!” The forcefulness of her denial surprised even her. She had spoken so loudly that everyone in the room looked at her. “I have to go to New Mexico.”
Noah frowned in irritation. “Jenna, you’ve done enough. Cort can take care of this with a phone call. You don’t need to be there.”
“But I do. I have to be there,” she repeated. “I’m the only one who can stop it.”
“Why?”
She had no answer. There was no rational explanation for the compulsion she felt, but if she revealed her uncertainty, Noah would never agree.
“There’s more to the instructions,” she lied, except part of her realized it wasn’t a lie. While the coded message did contain some specific instructions, its primary function was to activate the implanted memories. Although that door had closed, Jenna knew that there was a lot more that had not been revealed to her. “I think I have to go there to unlock the rest.”
“You think?”
She gripped his arm. “Noah, you have to trust me. I’m the only one who can stop it.”
Noah’s frown deepened. “I believe you, but I’m not the one you have to convince.”
Jenna turned to Cort. “If you get me to New Mexico, then I’m all yours. You can ship me off to one of your secret prisons, throw me in a hole and make me disappear forever.”
Noah stepped between her and Cort. “Jenna, don’t be stupid.”
Jenna pointed at the computer screen where the message was still displayed. “You see that? How the message ends?”
Nobody had commented on the last line of the transmission, the final marching orders for each clone. Four simple but ominous words in plain English.
Wipe the slate clean.
“That’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get to New Mexico. What happens after that doesn’t matter, because if I don’t get there, there isn’t going to be an ‘after.’”
Noah stared at her for a long time, his expression twisted with emotions that he was no longer able to suppress.
It was Cort that finally broke the silence. “So I’m supposed to take you at your word? What, are you gonna pinky-swear to give yourself up when it’s all done?”
Before Jenna could answer, Mercy spoke. “I’ll stay. You can keep me as collateral.”
“Mercy, no.” Jenna heard Noah echoing her own denial, but Mercy just shook her head.
“It’s okay, Jenna. I believe you. I know that you have to do this. It sickens me that we were used like this.” Jenna knew what Mercy meant by ‘we.’ She wasn’t just Jenna’s sister or mother. All of the clones had been created using her DNA. “And this way, we’ll still be together when it’s all over.”
Cort just laughed. “What the hell? It’s a deal.”
56
Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico, USA
5:05 p.m. (Mountain Daylight Time)
The flight took six hours but to Jenna it felt like hardly any time had passed. Part of this was due to her anxiety about what would happen when they arrived. Time always seemed to drag when she was looking forward to something good—the last day of school or a birthday—and flew by when something bad loomed on the horizon.
She thought she would be able to spend at least some of the trip sleeping, but even though she felt dead on her feet, every time she closed her eyes, she had a vision of Mercy, flanked by Cort’s men, waving good-bye. She settled for a hot meal from the Gulfstream’s galley, washed down with several bottles of Pepsi, and she listened in as the rest of the group discussed strategy.
Cort had wasted no time asserting his authority, and Noah did not challenge him. Jenna sensed that her insistence on making the trip—and her decision to surrender to Cort at the cost of Mercy’s freedom—had taken the wind out of Noah’s sails. That, and the fact that he had been shot just eighteen hours earlier.
The wound wasn’t serious—the bullet had deflected off a rib, fracturing it and tearing up the surrounding tissue, but doing no damage to vital organs—but a gunshot was a gunshot. He bore the pain stoically, but Jenna saw how he winced a little whenever he changed position.
He had been taken to the hospital, along with the two deputies who—Jenna was pleased to learn—had also survived the shooting, thanks to their standard-issue body armor. Noah had managed to slip away but had arr
ived at Mercy’s trailer just as the police were showing up. With no way to track Jenna and Mercy, he had turned to his old handler at the Agency—Bill Cort—who had briefed him on the sanction and the reasons behind it. Noah had been as surprised as Cort when he learned of Jenna’s arrival at the safe house.
Jenna didn’t believe Cort’s assertion that he had been out of the loop on the decision to send the hit team, but they were well past the point where recriminations would make any difference.
Soter also seemed to have set aside his aversion toward the men who had killed his team and destroyed his lab fifteen years earlier. Jenna suspected that had more to do with the realization that he had been a pawn in the opening move in a war to destroy humanity. He spent nearly two full hours describing the history of the project. The account was more or less the same as what he had told Jenna during the flight from Miami, but the air of pride had faded. It was now a recitation of facts. When he was done, he gave what information he could concerning the whereabouts of more than a dozen clones—Jenna noted that he no longer referred to them as his children.
The conversation had come around to the transmission’s origin. Soter maintained that an extraterrestrial intelligence was the most plausible explanation, but Cort seemed reluctant to even speculate. “Let’s just deal with one thing at time,” he said.
It seemed to Jenna like textbook denial. An extraterrestrial explanation would not only mean a threat beyond comprehension, and possibly against which humanity would be powerless, but it would also invalidate a host of beliefs about the nature of life and the meaning of existence. It was no surprise that Cort shied away from the topic. Jenna had her own reasons for not wanting to discuss it. The entire conversation had been an excruciating ordeal, in which her very artificial origin was dissected and put on display. Her unique abilities—what her school teachers called ‘gifts’—had occasionally made her the target of ridicule from jealous classmates, but she had never felt the kind of embarrassment she now felt listening to this discussion.
She felt like a freak. No, worse than that: an illegitimate freak.
Noah sensed her discomfort, holding her hand, squeezing reassurance into her, but she endured without comment. The events surrounding her, past and future, were much more important than her hurt feelings.
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 27
