“It was directions, Talon. Like yours.”
“Directions?”
“Yes. On how to exactly do the extraction. So you see, I’m not a legend as much as a phony.”
“Oookay.” Talon tried to follow, but Aberdeen was making it difficult. “Again, what does it have to do with me?”
“Here, see for yourself.”
Aberdeen disappeared for a minute and returned with the innocent-looking paper in her hand.
April 4
Lennon will come to house late. Use her as unwilling escort into house using airbrella as cover. Be careful on the stairs. She will kick and scream. Lennon will lead you into the office. Computer is painting.
Office Door Code: 876440
Escape through window.
“No wonder you didn’t trust me. How is this possible?”
“I don’t trust you,” Aberdeen clarified. “I don’t know how, but you’re a part of this.”
“No one gave me any hints or slips of paper, Aberdeen,” Talon assured her. As much as she understood Aberdeen’s apprehension, she couldn’t help but be a little offended. It was the second time someone accused her of cheating.
“Say it again,” Aberdeen walked over to Talon, grabbed her shoulders, and looked her dead in her eyes. “Activate lie detector.”
“No one helped me in any way on that final exam. I completely changed my game plan when the doc…senator, walked over to the statue with Kasilla…Lennon.”
Aberdeen stood and let out the air out of her lungs with an exasperated sigh. “That’s how it all got started. I hurt my leg that night, you know.”
Talon remembered the searing pain in her leg after she had crashed down the stairs during her final. Luckily, injury in a simulation wasn’t real. “But the note warned you.”
“Yeah, well, I guess it was fate or something. I hurt my leg jumping out of the damn window. My career was over after that. I thought it was payback for having taken credit. A few people looked over my extraction recording…we have to take video in case we run into any legal problems… and they started calling me the legend. I let them. It felt good. If only they knew I was just a pawn in some vigilantes game.” Aberdeen reached into the cupboard of a wet bar and pulled out a handle of whiskey. Instead of using a flask she brought the whole bottle to her lips and took a swig. “I’m not an alcoholic, I promise.”
“So you think she’s a vigilante then?”
“Well, she helped us bring down the senator and then shot a terrorist in the head, so that makes me think she can’t be too bad.”
Talon had just assumed she was there to kill Morten, but now she could see the mysterious woman might be one of the good ones.
“I looked back over the video when I was stuck on Dedrake. I couldn’t find anything that would provide a lead on identity or affiliations. So you have no idea who it is either?”
“I’ve been obsessing over it after I viewed your recordings from the moon and I knew it wasn’t you.” She took another swig. “I think it’s Lennon.”
“What?! The girl from the simulation? She’s missing now.”
“Yes, she is. I don’t think she was in love with the senator at all.”
“They did seem like a very odd couple,” Talon had to admit.
“She had access to everything in his house. He gave her passwords, security clearance…she could have manipulated the whole thing.”
If Lennon was the mystery hooded figure, the older one, wouldn’t Nervista have recognized her voice in the shadows? “Tell me exactly what happened at the party during the actual extraction. It had to be different from my final in a lot of ways.”
“By the time Lennon showed up everyone had already left and Nervista had passed out. I took her hostage and walked through the front door using the airbrella as cover. Because of the warning in the note I was ready for her on the stairs.” Aberdeen looked guilty when she said, “I closed my eyes and took a matropathiol-soaked rag out of my pocket. Made her pass out right in my arms.”
“So that’s not on record?”
“No, I did a pretty good job of hiding the footage. That’s part of the training you know,” she laughed hesitantly. It was obvious drugging an innocent civilian made her feel a little guilty. “Of course everyone knew what I did, but we think we’re above the law sometimes. I left Lennon in the upstairs hallway and just followed the rest of the directions on the paper. Everything was right about the painting and the passwords. I jumped out of the window, apparently not carefully enough, and limped off. He was arrested the next morning after we hacked into it.”
“No security alarms went off?”
“No.”
“And Lennon?”
“Gone. It’s like she disappeared off the universe.”
“Did you look at the security footage from the night at the party? I know the senator had to have cameras.”
“The whole system was deactivated at the time. Again, Lennon could have staged the whole thing.”
“Wow. Is that why it was made our final simulation? Because it was so weird?”
“They wanted to throw me in the education department after I hurt my leg. They tried to convince me, the legend, that I needed to teach the next generations of talented intelligence operatives. Between the mysterious note and Lennon missing, I became obsessed with the night of the party...with reliving it. I asked to work on the simulation team and talked them into using a modified version of Nervista’s party as your cohort’s final exam. I wanted to know if vigilante’s way was the only way or if I ended up with a stupid bum leg for no reason. I wanted to see if Nervista’s mind slipped an extra detail to one of you guys…anything that could lead me to this person. It was approved and I did Nervista’s neural extraction. I watched time and time again as your classmates failed, except you. And you had it harder than I did!”
Talon felt for Aberdeen, who was rubbing the stress from her eyes, but there were still so many unanswered questions. “If you could only base Lennon’s personality off of Nervista’s neural extraction, why did she pull the stair stunt with me?”
“I was biased. I programmed it in.”
After I saw that footage I had my eye on you. It didn’t…doesn’t make any sense! I convinced the committee to let you come with me as a state investigator so I could get closer to you…figure you out. They weren’t going to let you do covert operations no matter how talented you are because of your personal life. And me,” she shook her head, “this is where I’ll be with my bum leg. Doing cop stuff. I guess they put me on this case as a way to wean me off.” She took another big swig of whiskey. “They felt bad for me…the crippled legend.”
Talon frowned. “I went to the moon as a favor to you and then was kicked out as a favor to you?” As if she could be any more insulted.
“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t have to do much convincing. Little did I know this stolen ship situation, which I thought was going to be an in-the-bag case, turned into its own solar storm of a mess. I could see in your eyes you were a good guy, and I know you’re crazy talented, but also reckless.”
“But once you figured out I wasn’t your vigilante you kicked me to the curb? You wrote those reports to save your own ass and save your ego,” Talon accused.
“I have the credibility and I’m not perfect. You can imagine how mad I was to find out you kept your fugitive encounter from me. Still…there’s something going on with you and whoever that woman is and I can’t put my finger on it.”
There was a lot for Talon to digest. “What’s happened since I’ve left?”
Aberdeen just shrugged and took another swig.
“No leads on any front?”
“You were right about Chris. He was payed off to slip Morten three too many sleeping pills in the breakroom coffee. Apparently, it was a ritual for the poor man to grab a cup before he started his shift. Other than that, Chris didn’t know anything. Hell, he didn’t even know they were going to steal the ships. Nothing in the evidence bags
. No leads on where the ships are or who else is involved other than little black killer.”
“The boots?”
“Only had your DNA.”
“This person is like a ghost.”
“Yeah. So, whatever lead you have would be helpful.”
It felt good to be needed, but the truth was Talon couldn’t continue on without Aberdeen either. “The ‘pecs are getting a tattoo right before they are released. I think the symbol is our next lead.”
Aberdeen pulled up her laptop and looked at Drake’s autopsy report. “He had quite a few tattoos. This could take all night.”
“Yeah, I’d say.” There was more ink on him than actual skin. “Did Reed have any tattoos?” she asked as she scanned through the photos.
“Not according to the report..”
“Drake seemed to be kind of their leader anyways.”
“So many of these could be clues.”
“No. It’s this one, on his forearm.”
“It’s on top of another tattoo. What creature is this?”
“This is not a real animal. It’s a myth from an ancient people. This is the symbol for Sagittarius, the star constellation. People often match them with their birth dates.”
Aberdeen tapped her fingers on the glass of her device. “Sagittarius. But his birthday would put him as an Aries.”
“Maybe his mother or sister was a Sagittarius. Or maybe it doesn’t have to do with birthdays at all.”
“I don’t know about this human myth.”
“Well, centaurs are savage, hateful beasts in Greek Mythology…but not Chiron. He was kind and thoughtful, a contrast to his race. He was killed by Hercules, a half-man, half-God by mistake.”
“Hmm, so you’re thinking symbolism?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about this part?” She said looking at the intersecting lines. “It looks like the rays coming out of a star. Is this creature shooting the star, or is the star on the end of his arrow? Here, I have an idea,” she said, pulling up another program on the computer. Aberdeen somehow separated the star on the tattoo and converted it to a black and white drawing. She opened up another program and attached it to a search engine. “Ah, here we go. It says this image most closely resembles the pioneer plaque. There’s a picture of it here. What is that?”
“I don’t know,” Talon admitted. “What does it say?”
“Oh my God,” Aberdeen gasped as she read silently for several moments. “These lines are the coordinates of Earth’s sun. They were attached to human ships during the time of the 1970’s. In case aliens intersected these ships, they would know the exact coordinates of Earth. Apparently the Sydces actually came across one of these ships! This is the drawing that brought our two worlds together.”
“I guess science is universal.”
“So this creature, who might represent the Sinupecs, is shooting Earth?”
“Drake said something bad was going to happen there!” Talon began pacing around the room in distress. She already knew that. This tattoo was supposed to tell her something she didn’t know.
“But look!” Aberdeen said after studying the pictures. “The lines are different. These are coordinates to another star.”
“Do you think it’s Dedrake”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
Aberdeen and Talon worked to understand the periods and pulsars on the image. They then used the same technique and applied it to triangulate the coordinates of whatever sun it was giving directions to.
“There’s too many stars!” Aberdeen threw her device on the opposite side of the bed. “How is it supposed to be some coordinate if it takes a hundred krevinu to figure out!?”
Talon was feeling just as discouraged, but Aberdeen’s burst of frustration may have just been the thing she needed to hear.
“I’ve got it!” Talon screamed feeling the rush of a eureka moment. “Sagittarius isn’t symbolizing an earthly constellation but the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way. Here,” she shoved her computer toward Aberdeen.
Twenty minutes later Aberdeen jerked upwards in her own revelation. “I could kiss you!” She studied the cosmic address’s nearby star. “No one has ever been to this sun’s planetary system. It has fifteen orbiting space bodies that are large enough to be considered planets. What do you think it means.”
“Heath said the terrorists were getting this tattoo a day or two before being released. This is directions. I think it means we’ve figured out the home base of the most dangerous terrorist group the universe has ever known. Those trails they lost, did they happen to point in the direction of this planetary system?”
“Kelly and Brody worked on that yesterday, let me pull it up. The trajectory is spot on.”
“You can’t get to this place without creating a wormhole,” Talon pointed out. “That’s why there were no micro-particle trails to follow.”
“How would we know which of the fifteen exoplanets to look at?” Talon wondered. “We can’t go poking around and tip them off.”
“Or worse, start a war. We’re going to have to contract out a natural sciences team at the Interstellar Institute to help us with this.”
“And then what?”
Aberdeen looked at Talon sympathetically. “I know you want to be involved in this, but technically you’re not allowed to be working on this assignment at all. If the agency knew you were here…,” she trailed off, not wanting to voice the consequences for both of them.
Talon knew Aberdeen was right. “I can’t sit at my desk and not help, Aberdeen.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t risk communicating with you like this. It will turn into a highly classified assignment and it would be a felony to discuss details with a security officer. Your contribution to this will be known when it’s over, I promise. I will personally advocate for your induction onto the black floor.”
“Can’t you advocate now?”
Aberdeen shook her head. “When it’s over. You’ve got to hang low until then.”
Talon knew it would never be over. “Alright,” she lied.
14 STOWAWAY
Make this the last time, Talon’s aching wrists’ begged. No matter how many blows she hurled, her frustrations hung in her heart as stubbornly as the sack of sand from the ceiling. It mockingly swung at her and she punched it ten more times. Talon felt helpless, worthless, and utterly bored. She’d been sulking in the apartment for three days with no contact from Levi and plenty of news to keep her worry alive. Why couldn’t he extend again to see her?
To make matters worse, her desk might as well be a cell block. They even took away her gun. She was stuck doing court paperwork and other paper shuffling duties. Wilga and Aberdeen were tight-lipped and borderline avoiding her. She hadn’t heard anything about the progress on the suspected home base of the Sinupecs. Talon punched the bag again. She had the cosmic address of her father and no way to get there. She left the condo gym and took the elevator up to their penthouse floor.
“I didn’t know this building had a pool,” Bockie looked at Talon’s drenched figure from the couch. Her grandmother-in-law, who had returned to Ohmani with her, had a key to their apartment and often let herself in when she needed a break from the overly worrisome Axella.
“It doesn’t.”
“Oo, someone’s a little grouchy.”
Talon slammed the door to the bathroom and tried to wash her irritability away. Between Levi and being kept in the dark at work, she was over it. The only reason she was being so cantankerous was because of the potentially dire consequences of her discoveries. It’s not that she didn’t trust Aberdeen and the agency to be successful, but this investigation was her baby now and it was hard to give it up and resort to being a sitting duck. What was her father planning? She needed him arrested, or better yet, dead. She needed to bring his whole operation to its knees and then shoot it between the eyes. The thought made her feel better.
“You should come watch this show!” Bockie invited as Talon po
ured a generous glass of wine.
“What’s it about?”
“They put fifteen people on some unknown planet and they have to survive.”
“That sounds interesting. I love learning about new planets,” she said.
“Well, it’s more about the people than the planet. They put them into teams. This year the show grouped them into species type and they have to compete against each other.”
“That sounds a little racist.” Talon pulled out her computer.
“Yeah, I guess,” Bockie conceded, “but they also compete within their team. They vote to kick members off the planet. Whoever is the last one standing wins.”
“So basically it’s not really teams. Whoever is the strongest will win. I could pick the strongest person out in the first episode,” she bragged.
“A lot of times the team will vote to kick the strongest person off the planet so they won’t win. There’s a lot of strategy involved.”
Talon furrowed her brows in confusion. “I see. So basically it’s a drama show, not a survival show.”
“Yes, the best kind,” Bockie shoved a chip into her mouth.
“Is there something wrong with the TV?”
“No. They’re on this planet called Hikonvis. It orbits a red dwarf star so there’s no white light. Everything is red, my favorite color.”
“Interesting. I bet this show has a whole team dedicated to finding habitable planets.” Maybe she could work with one of them to find her father’s home base planet.
“Funny you mention that. Kierra is working on that right now. She just got the assignment a couple of days ago.”
Talon snapped her head up at the news. Kierra Jenikee was a graduate student in astrobiology at the Interstellar Institute. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve always been so fond of the girl. I try to visit her every now and then…just saw her yesterday.”
Fate was on her side. She bounced up from the chair and retrieved her phone.
An Eagle's Revenge (Across the Infinite Void Book 2) Page 17
