“That will not be as easy as you hope. We can track it by satellite, but a new team is at least twenty-four hours out. If anything were to happen to Ms. McKenzie, there would be little we could do.”
“Well, that ship has sailed, hasn’t it, Captain Kirk?”
Teller calmly turned to face Kelly. “I believe our current situation is the result of your little escapade, Mr. Graham. Correct?” He raised one eyebrow.
“Hey, at least I’m doing something.” The room fell quiet again.
“Kelly—”Freya began.
“Ah, fuck this.” Kelly stormed out of the room toward his bunk.
“He’s a liability,” Teller said.
“He has his uses,” Freya replied.
“I go find him,” Minya offered, stepping out of the room after Kelly—anything to be away from the room full of people.
“No, I’ll go,” Freya said. “I don’t trust you.”
Location: Dulce Base, New Mexico, USA
Freya watched Kelly through the doorway. He was drinking that goddamn tea again—lost in his own thoughts, his own world. He still wasn’t free of the pain of losing his wife and adopted child and now K’in as well. That had been the last straw. The bond between them had been strong. When K’in died, saving her, it had broken him.
She slid into the room, careful not to wake him, and cautiously sat on the floor by his side. His eyelids were fluttering. He was probably visualizing some crazy hallucination. She softly stroked his shorn head. The stupid man—for all his strength, he was the most lost person she knew. Yet when it came down to it, he was there for Victoria in her time of need. And he’d been willing to sacrifice himself to Wak for her. Always the hero.
He jolted awake, snorting.
Freya recoiled and let out a tiny yelp. She clenched her jaw and hit him in the arm. “You asshole, you scared the shit out of me!”
“I’m, uh, sorry.” Kelly rubbed his head.
“What did you dream about this time?”
“Hair.”
“What?”
“Hair,” he repeated.
“Are you joking?”
Kelly wet his lips. “No, I saw hair. Lots of it. It was weird. The hair turned into ropes, and then I climbed the ropes and came to a huge place filled with blue light. Then I woke up.” He held on to his stomach and groaned.
“You’re not going to vomit, are you?” Freya asked, shifting away.
“I’ll try not to.” He feigned a smile. “Anyway, what do you want?”
“I just came to see how you are. I know this is all very difficult for you. I just wanted you to know I appreciate it.” She put a hand on his knee.
“I don’t think your boyfriend appreciates my help,” retorted Kelly. “Or you touching me, I’d imagine.”
Freya backed off. “Look, I’m just trying to be a friend.”
“I don’t need friends.”
“Yes, you do. Everybody does. It wasn’t so long ago that we ...”
“Didn’t take you long to move on though, right?”
Freya tightened her lips in frustration. “I asked you to stay.”
“And I told you I couldn’t.”
“Then there was no reason to wait, was there?” Freya’s eyes widened, waiting—hoping—for a crack in his stubbornness.
“But with the Star Trek nerd? Really?” He coughed and held his stomach, grimacing.
“Jonathan Teller is a brilliant man. He was transferred to the NSA after his skills in our little escapade were recognized. After some pretty intense testing, it turned out he’s hyper-intelligent. In terms of warfare strategy, at least—”
“The guy that pulled a gun on you in Siberia?”
“He was doing his duty.”
“Duty?” Kelly huffed. “Well, some guys put career first.”
“And some guys stick around.”
Damn. “He still has a thing for green women and guys with pointy ears,” Kelly snapped.
“Everyone has something.”
“Hey, whatever floats your boat. None of my business.” He tried prying himself from the floor, but nausea overwhelmed him.
Freya’s nostrils flared. “Whether or not you like it, Kelly Graham—”
“Not?” Kelly interrupted.
“What?”
“You said not.”
“Well, yes, but I don’t see—”
“Knot! Jesus, I’m stupid.” He palm-slapped his own forehead and scrambled to his feet before tearing out of the room and down the corridor, leaving Freya dumbfounded and alone.
Teller stepped into the room, almost having been mowed down by Kelly, and clicked his cell phone off. “Where the hell is he running off to?”
Freya sighed. “I have no idea.”
“Should we follow him?”
“I guess so. Whatever it is, it got him off his near-to-vomiting ass. Who was that on the phone?”
“No one important. After you, sweetie.”
Freya groaned as she climbed to her feet and sauntered out of the door. “I told you not to call me that.”
It was an easy taunt to deflect her question. He squeezed the phone in his fist and followed her down the corridor.
* * *
The couple meandered along the hallway, searching each of the rooms for Kelly, until they eventually found him outside the door of the security office, arguing with the guard.
“Look, pal, this whole thing is above your pay grade, so how about you just be a good little boy and let me in, huh?”
“Not interrupting, are we?” Teller asked in his ever-calm tone.
“I was just explaining to GI Joke here that I need to get inside the security office.”
“It may help if you could tell us why you need to get in there, Kelly,” Freya offered.
“The knots,” Kelly replied.
“We’re gonna need a bit more than that, I’m afraid,” Teller said.
Kelly huffed in exasperation. “The knots,” he repeated. “The knots in her hair. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”
“Oh, sure, now it’s clearer.” Teller shrugged and shook his head.
“Just let us in, corporal. It’s okay, we’ll be with him,” Freya said.
The young officer took a step to the side and swiped his card through a reader. The door lock popped. Kelly immediately snatched the door open and raced inside, startling the on-duty soldier, a rotund man in his mid-fifties, who looked like part of the furniture as if he had been at the facility long enough to have seen most things.
“Can you bring up footage of Victoria in the last few days?” Kelly asked.
The old soldier stared at Teller, who had followed Kelly through, and awaited instruction.
Teller nodded, indicating the officer should comply.
“Sure,” he said, spinning in his chair and punching the keyboard in front of him. “What time frame do you want?”
“Just the last couple of days. I need a clear shot of her head from several angles,” Kelly replied.
The soldier adjusted his wire-framed glasses and tapped in instructions, resulting in various images appearing on the multitude of monitors in front of him. They were stills of Victoria in the laboratory. She’d clearly been pacing, which had allowed the various cameras in the room to capture her from multiple angles.
“Okay, zoom in on that one and that one.” Kelly’s index finger left smudge marks on two of the screens, one showing the back of her head and the other showing her from the front. “Do you see it?” He shot a hopeful glance at Teller and Freya.
They leaned forward and stared harder.
“What are we looking at?” Freya asked.
Teller stood upright and rubbed his clean-shaven chin. “They’re quipus.”
“Exactly,” exclaimed Kelly.
“Okay, boys, let the rest of us play,” Freya said. “What are quipus?”
“Talking knots,” Teller replied. “Very clever, Mr. Graham. It seems you do have uses.”
“What ar
e you talking about?” Freya demanded.
“Quipus.” Kelly beamed, proud of his discovery and of redeeming himself. “Quipus are used as a three-dimensional, knowledge-recording system. Historically, they were used in Andean South America. Back then, a quipu was made of a bunch of colored thread or string twisted together to form a cord. The cords used knots of different sizes, colors, and spacing to encode information. Numbers, mainly.”
“There’s information in her hair?”
“Yes. My dream was trying to tell me, but I didn’t see it. She’s been subconsciously tying braids and knots in her hair.”
Teller stepped up to the screen and began typing away.
“Can you decode it?” Freya asked, hopefully.
“I don’t see why knot.” Teller grinned at his own pun.
“That was lame, Teller,” complained Kelly. “This guy? Really?” He glanced at Freya.
Freya scowled back at him.
Teller ignored the comment and carried on typing. The images on the screen became wireframe and colorless. The outline of Victoria’s hair was isolated and pulled out from the still on its own. Then, with a few more key punches, the hair schematic was stretched flat, much like a map of the world being peeled from its spherical mount and flattened into two dimensions. He typed a few more key words, accessing a secure server, and stepped back.
“Is that it?” Kelly asked, somewhat disappointed.
“I’ve accessed the NSA’s code-cracking program using quipus as the main decryption unit. Quipus are a base-ten positional system. It shouldn’t be long.”
As if on cue, numbers appeared below the various braids in Victoria’s hair: 1 9 6 8 3 3, 9 8 8 5 0 0.
They stared at the screen.
Freya squinted her eyes and cocked her head. “They’re coordinates.”
Teller nodded. “You’re damn right. 19.6833 north by 98.8500 west.”
“Jesus, why do you guys make me feel like I belong in remedial class?”
Teller and Freya exchanged an amused glance.
Kelly sighed. “Okay, brainiacs. Where do the coordinates point to?”
“Let’s see.” Teller tapped into the system again, bringing up a geolocator. He punched in the coordinates. An image of the globe spanned quickly and slowed over Central America. It zoomed in over Mexico City and then slightly south before coming to rest over a barren wasteland, punctuated by crumbling buildings that appeared uninterestingly square from the limited aerial view.
“Where is that?” Freya asked.
They studied the map for a few moments.
“Teotihuacan,” Kelly said softly.
“You know it?”
“Yeah.” Kelly nodded. “I was supposed to do a job down there. Chris wanted to go, but I didn’t. So we never went. Selfish, really.”
“Oh,” was all Freya could say.
Kelly thought of his best friend. The pain in his chest returned. Shit, he missed him. He shook the thought from his head. “That must be where they’re going.”
“Okay, but why there?” Freya turned to Teller for an answer.
“Hmm. I’m not up-to-date on this one. But that’s what the Internet is for, right?” Teller keyed Teotihuacan into a general search engine.
“You’re Googling it? So much for the NSA.” Kelly turned to Freya and mouthed, this guy?
Freya rolled her eyes.
“Sometimes, Mr. Graham,” Teller began without breaking his concentration on the monitor. “You need to consider your best sources of information. This place is not exactly high on the NSA’s watch list.”
The screen filled with references to Teotihuacan. Teller scanned them, opening up various websites and personal pages. His eyes moved rapidly as he absorbed the information at lightning speed and then moved on.
“Okay. It seems that Teotihuacan was a large city in Mesoamerica during pre-Columbian times. Thought to have been built around 100 BC and lasted until around the 7th or 8th century AD, yadda yadda yadda ...” He scrolled through more. “Seems to be a lot of conspiracy theory and alternate history sites dedicated to this place. Some debate on when it was actually built, and no race of people was attributed to building it” More scrolling. “The name Teotihuacan was given to the place by the Aztecs long after it was built. It means ‘the place of the gods’ or ‘where man met the gods.’”
“Stop! That’s gotta be it—where Wak is taking her. C’mon.” Kelly was already halfway out of the door.
“Wait, Mr. Graham.” Teller put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder but then dropped it, not wanting to anger him. “It’s a massive tourist trap. I’ll contact the local authorities in Mexico City and clear the site first. Then we can track them by satellite, ensure that really is their destination.”
Kelly nodded. That made sense.
“Okay. And I want Minya with us. We brought her along on this little trip because she knows about this kind of stuff,” Freya said. “We may need her to translate something.”
“I’ll find her,” Kelly replied.
“Affirmative.” Teller moved toward the door, his hand already fishing for his cell phone. “I want to move on this immediately. I need everyone prepped and ready in an hour. Grab the last of the team based here as well. We’ll need them. Understood?”
Freya nodded. “I’ll inform the Secretary.”
Kelly gave a mock salute and marched out of the security office. Teller tried to follow suit, but Freya called after him.
“Jonathan?”
He paused, his hand still in his pocket, clasping the cell phone. “Yeah?”
“Have you spoken with my godfather? Do you know how he is?” She smiled weakly, hoping for good news.
General Benjamin Lloyd was still serving his sentence for his part in the original cloning debacle. He’d refused to see Freya, saying he was ashamed enough. Teller had used his influence in the NSA to keep tabs on the old man for her. He even convinced the General to allow Teller to visit once in a while. But recently, news of Freya’s only family member had been thinner and thinner.
“No,” Teller replied. “I gotta make a phone call. Can we talk about this later, sweetie?”
She wrinkled her nose at hearing the pet name again. He only ever used it to placate her. He may be around in body, but his mind was always elsewhere. “Sure.” She offered him a weak smile.
He winked and slipped out of the door, pulling the phone from his jacket.
Location: 14K convoy, leaving Illinois, USA
The Shan Chu sat alone in the back of the truck. His brow was furrowed, and his eyes were closed as he tried to focus on his task. It was difficult to separate the hatred in his heart from his objective as the two were intertwined. He had been born into the Green and Red Societies. He knew no different. They were his family. When he had been seven-years old, his father had died in a gunfight in Hong Kong over a feud with another member, a pure-blood Chinese, a Red Pole, an enforcer—a dealer of death. His Japanese heritage had once again been a point of contention.
This enforcer had taken the son of the man he had killed as a prize and personal slave. For the first few years, it had been hell. He suffered savage beatings and humiliation at the hands of the pure-bloods. But as time had passed, he had proven his value. His abilities had become well known among his clan. He was first involved in collecting debts and protecting money for the Red Pole, and his reputation as a tiny assassin spread quickly. His unassuming size meant he was able to get close to his victims before he pulled out a small blade. Careful to kill only the family members of the individual who owed money, he always collected the debt.
His first kill, the young wife of a dry cleaner who wasn’t paying his protection debt, was easier than he had ever imagined. He had simply wandered to the front door of her home and knocked on it. When she’d answered, she offered a smile at the small boy before her. He’d calmly asked if she was the wife of the dry cleaner. She’d nodded enthusiastically and enquired whether the boy had left something in their shop. He had plainly inf
ormed her that her husband owed his master money and she should give it to him. The woman’s smile had faded and her tone had become that of a scolding mother.
This had irritated him and encouraged him into action probably faster than he would normally have chosen. The blade sliced across her pale exposed flesh with great speed. The woman crumpled to the ground, weeping and clutching at the wound that would not close—no matter how hard she pressed.
He stepped over her, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her wailing into the house before closing the door behind. He searched the house, but as it turned out, the couple really had no money. So he slit the throats of their three dogs and left. Two days later, the dry cleaner paid his debt.
There was no remorse, no guilt. In fact, all he could think about was his next kill and the feel of warm blood spraying onto his hands and face. Yes, this was his calling. He was Jia-nghù Tsai, the Tokyo Boy.
At the age of twelve, he was initiated into the brotherhood. The youngest member of his clan to undergo the ceremony, he readily sacrificed a pig at the altar of Guan Yu. He gulped the wine mixed with thick porcine blood so feverishly that much of it spilled over his face and tunic. With a crazed look in his eyes and his clothes stained red, he marched under the arch of swords held aloft by his Red and Green brothers while he recited the thirty-six oaths.
Now, more than twenty years later, he was the leader—the Shan Chu. And he was close to achieving the goal given to him by his father and his father’s father—kill everyone who stood in the way of their ultimate supremacy.
A light buzzing pulled his gaze toward the cell phone on the seat next to him. He scooped it up and read the text.
Change of direction. Teotihuacan. They will be exposed. There will be a gap in the perimeter.
The Shan Chu rapped on the shoulder of his driver and gave the new directions. The man nodded and radioed to the rest of the convoy before checking his mirror and veering off at the next exit. The Shan Chu pulled on the sleeves of his jet-black Mao suit with gold-threaded buttons, rotating his shoulders. He didn’t like unforeseen changes to the plan. The short communications didn’t allow any explanation. On top of that, he had not heard from his team who had been tasked with obtaining the uranium. This made him nervous. He didn’t like relying on foreigners in his coalition to do their part—their job.
Children of the Fifth Sun Page 37
