She tried not to think about the bodies in the other tent.
The ones growing hotter.
Chapter Forty-One
Martha
An hour later, Martha sat at the table in the small room at the back of the Zigzag ranger station with Harbin, Russel Fravel, and Joy Reiber. Holt’s laptop sat between them. They’d powered it up and tried so many different passwords the system now required them to wait one minute between each attempt. They had no idea what it could be. Harbin had even gone back and searched Holt’s tent in hopes of finding something that might provide a clue, but even the muddy socks he had found the last time were gone.
Brenna Hauff was out in the main room watching the door—when they came to take her back to the crevasse, she’d refused. Brian Tomes had reluctantly gone. Martha pretended not to hear when Harbin pointed out the laptop’s fingerprint reader, told him to keep it in mind if he found Holt’s body. Tomes had simply nodded as if this request were no more obscene than “pick up a gallon of milk at the store.” Then he walked off toward the awaiting helicopter. Sergeant Riley had boarded that one, too. They’d last seen Fraser on the opposite side of the camp, where they appeared to be reinforcing the newly constructed wall.
When the timer on the laptop ticked to zero and the password box reappeared, they consulted the list of possible passwords they’d made on the whiteboard.
“Try Patriot again, but replace the letters with numbers and symbols, like P@tr10t,” Reiber suggested.
Fravel shrugged, keyed in the word, and hit enter. The box flashed red, and the timer reappeared. Fifty-nine seconds…
“How many doctoral degrees do we have in this room and not a single hacker?” Harbin balked. “We’re not going to get in with blind guesses.”
“Ironically, Holt is probably the only one who would know how to bypass computer security. I imagine that’s a skill they teach when they hand out their magic decoder spy rings,” Reiber said.
Fravel pushed the laptop back several inches and scratched at a stain on the table with his fingernail. “If I had a USB drive and access to the internet, I could get in.”
“Well, we have neither of those things,” Harbin muttered.
The clock ticked back down to zero. Fravel keyed in another word, hit enter, and the timer reappeared.
“What did you try?”
“Spook, but with zeros.”
Martha went to take another sip of her coffee and realized her mug was empty.
Before she could get up, Harbin took hers along with his and walked over to the coffee maker for refills. Nobody else was drinking coffee. When he sat back down, he said, “Tell us about the girls.”
Martha hadn’t stopped thinking about them. “I had to sedate the younger one, Sophie. Then I got an IV in her with a mix of saline, high-dose NSAIDs, and antibiotics. The ice helped. I managed to get her fever down to 102, but without knowing the root cause, I feel like I’m stalling the inevitable. I found nothing abnormal in her blood work. Her current state aside, she’s actually remarkably healthy. So is her sister. I cleaned up their wounds, redressed their bandages. There’s not much more I can do.”
“And she couldn’t tell you anything? The older one?”
Martha shook her head. “Nothing useful. Their father rushed them down into a storm cellar, and they rode it out underground. That’s how they survived. She thought it was a tornado, so loud it shook the ground. She took her sister to a second shelter in hopes of reuniting with their parents. They were there when another one hit indirectly. She only recalls two instances.”
“Does that mean Holt was wrong about the two-hour window?”
Martha shrugged. “Who knows.”
Fravel typed in another incorrect password.
Nobody bothered to ask him what he entered.
“Where are they now?” Reiber asked.
“Resting. I don’t think either of them has slept much. The older one managed to stay upright long enough for a shower and some food, then she passed out the moment her head hit a pillow. Maybe when she wakes up, she’ll remember something else.”
Harbin considered all this. “Tennant and Sophie, right?”
She nodded. “Can I see the sat phone again?”
Reiber had used it last—but hadn’t gotten through. She slid the phone across the table to her, and Martha dialed her ex-husband for the third time in the past hour. For the third time, she got only voicemail. There was no point in leaving another message. She hung up. The clock on the wall read quarter after ten—he should be at work by now. The kids in school.
Fravel keyed in another password. “Oh, fuck.”
“What?” Martha asked.
He turned the laptop toward her so she could see the display. Rather than resetting to one minute, the countdown timer was now ticking down from an hour.
“That was a longshot anyway,” Harbin said, slouching in his chair.
Reiber brushed a loose strand of hair from her eye. “Any idea why the younger girl has been affected and not the older one?”
Again, Martha shrugged. “If this were viral, I’d look for immunities in Tennant. Possible inoculations she may have received earlier in life that her sister had not, like chickenpox, or measles, but that’s not the case. I sequenced Sophie’s blood and compared it to Tennant’s and a sample from both sets of victims in the tent—I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. No common thread, either. Tennant said her sister was with her all yesterday morning, right at her side, and yet somehow she was affected, and Tennant was not.”
“Unless the symptoms are late to present in Tennant,” Harbin pointed out. “Maybe age is a factor.”
“During the autopsies yesterday, Dr. Fitch pointed out the bodies we found in the village leaned more toward the extremes—either infants or the elderly. The ones in the crevasse, the ones with the fever-like symptoms, seemed to be the healthiest, most virile of the group.”
“Wouldn’t Tennant fit that definition more so than her sister, Sophie?”
Martha took another sip of coffee and nodded. “If we go by age alone, yes. That made me wonder if there was some other inherent difference. Something that hasn’t presented or isn’t apparent.”
“Like a genetic marker? Do you have the testing equipment?” Harbin asked.
“Gotta love the Army,” Martha said. “I asked for something, and ten minutes later they wheeled in a brand-new NovaSeq 6000. That’s a million-dollar piece of hardware. It can run a full sequence in a few hours. I’m running both girls, several samples from bodies found in the village, and some from the bodies found in the crevasse. The hot ones.”
Harbin perked up at this. “So he let you in that tent?”
Martha shook her head. “He had the samples brought to me, said Fitch collected them yesterday. They’re not letting anyone in that tent.”
From the other room, Hauff shouted, “Soldier coming toward us! Coming in fast!” She ran back in and fell into one of the empty chairs.
Fravel scrambled to his feet, unplugged the laptop, and shoved everything into the cabinet above the coffee maker.
Chapter Forty-Two
Martha
“Why just us? Why not the others?” Martha asked as she and Harbin followed the soldier through the camp, leaving the others in the Zigzag ranger station.
“You’ll have to ask Lieutenant Colonel Fraser, ma’am.”
He led them to Fraser’s tent and held the flap open for them.
Fraser was on a sat phone, standing behind a folding table set up as a desk with a laptop and several stacks of folders and notepads. When they entered, he hung up the call, set the phone aside, and gestured toward two chairs. “Sit.”
“Everyone should be here,” Martha said.
“Sit,” Fraser said again, the irritation clear on his face.
Harbin gave her a glance that seemed to say, let’s hear him out, then lowered himself into one of the folding chairs.
Martha sighed and fell into the seat beside hi
m.
Fraser eyed them both for a moment, then slid a sheet of paper across the desk.
Martha leaned forward. “Is that an executive order?”
Fraser nodded. “The president instituted a no-fly zone over 45-121. He’s quarantined a swath approximately sixty miles across the mountain and surrounding area.”
“Infected area,” Harbin read aloud.
“Affected is probably a more apt description, but it’s not my place to correct the president’s grammar. Roadblocks went up yesterday, and all air travel has been rerouted.”
“Why air travel?” Martha asked. “Is that to keep the press out?”
He pulled out a folder from the stack next to his laptop and dropped it between Martha and Harbin. “Whatever’s happening isn’t isolated to the ground. A private jet went down yesterday, a Hawker 800XP, ten souls on board. All dead. Came down in a valley on the east side of the mountain. Very remote. The White House is using the crash as an excuse to keep everyone away.”
“This means the anomaly isn’t just a ground-level event.” Harbin looked up at Fraser. “Do we know their altitude?”
“Twenty-three thousand feet,” Fraser stated flatly. “We recovered their data recorder. They engaged autopilot shortly after takeoff from Portland, switched to manual directly above 45-121, then immediately went into a dive. Voice communication with the tower was limited to takeoff. They were en route to Vegas and somehow got caught in the path of the anomaly. From what little we know, there doesn’t appear to be mechanical failure—the pilot switched off autopilot and put the plane in a steep dive. He downed the craft intentionally.”
Harbin had the folder open and was flipping through a series of photographs. The plane shot nearly straight down and hit the ground nose-first. There was hardly anything left. “How did the data recorder survive this?”
“No idea. They found a fully intact suitcase as well.”
Martha had seen that sort of thing before at other crash sites. Even in near total destruction, the strangest items sometimes survived with very little damage. She’d once investigated a downed 737 in Malaysia, and someone found an undamaged bottle of Moët buried under the remains of a wing.
Harbin asked, “If a plane got caught in the anomaly, does that mean we are, in fact, dealing with a satellite-based weapon?”
Fraser smirked at this. “Satellite-based? Who told you that?”
“We were speculating yesterday.”
Fraser shook his head dismissively. “According to some report out of USGS, the anomaly originated from below, not above. They traced seismic readings down nearly 2,900 kilometers.”
“Twenty-nine-hundred kilometers? That would put it nearly to the Earth’s core. That can’t be right.”
“Yet it is, according to them anyway.”
“Who is USGS?” Martha asked.
“United States Geological Survey,” Fraser said flatly. “Another team Holt brought in.”
Harbin said, “We need to speak to Frederick Hoover.”
“Not possible. Not right now.”
Before Harbin could respond, Fraser turned back to Martha. “What can you tell me about the girls?”
She repeated everything she’d told the others earlier.
Fraser listened, stone-faced. When she finished, he said, “So you’ve learned nothing.”
“This takes time.”
“We don’t have time.”
Martha closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She was getting a headache. “Do you have any kind of record of the people who live on the mountain? Tennant said her sister keeps asking for someone named Anna Shim, but she has no idea who that is. She said there was nobody in their village by that name. Sophie said the name several times while I was treating her. Seemed insistent about finding her, almost desperate.”
“Anna Shim?” Harbin repeated.
Martha nodded. “Tennant said there’s nobody in the surrounding villages by that name, either, but it could be one of the outliers. She said they tend to keep to themselves.”
Fraser frowned. “What’s an outlier?”
“That’s what they call the people who choose to live alone on the mountain rather than with one of the groups. Outliers. Extreme loners.”
“Jesus. Even society’s outcasts have outcasts.” Fraser shuffled through the folders on his desk, located one, and opened it. “These people don’t exactly fill out census data or pay taxes. They raise families out here, live, die, all of it completely off the grid. That makes tracking them problematic.” He found a list of names and ran his finger down the page. When he reached the bottom, he flipped to the next page. “They do like to read their books, though. They read a lot of books. This is a list of people who have memberships at the three nearest libraries—Parkdale, Hoodland, and Stevenson. Blue dots mean they have no reported income. Red means they’re collecting some sort of government assistance—some of them have no problem taking from the system, they just don’t like to pay in.” He flipped to the third page. “Names highlighted in yellow have a criminal record.”
Martha glanced over at Harbin. He’d closed the folder on the crash and was staring at the cover, his mind elsewhere. His index finger tapped against his temple, as if trying to coax out a thought.
Fraser finished the last page and sighed. “Several Annas, but nobody named Shim. Doesn’t mean much. She could be out there somewhere. Or it could be some make-believe imaginary friend.”
Harbin broke from his reverie and looked up at Fraser. “What’s going on with the bodies in the medical tent? Why are they getting hotter?”
“Who says they’re getting hotter?”
Martha leaned forward, frustrated. “You need to stop holding back.”
Someone knocked on the frame of the tent.
Fraser looked up. “Yes?”
A soldier stepped inside and quickly saluted. “Sir, we’ve had another attack.”
“Where?”
“Barton. A small town about fifty miles east of here. It’s…it’s bad.”
Fraser nodded. “Get the rest of the team and meet me at the helicopters. We’re in the air in ten minutes.” He closed the lid on his laptop and looked at both Martha and Harbin. “You’re both with me. I don’t want word of this getting out just yet.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Martha
“What do we know about Barton?” Martha said in the helicopter. They’d taken one of the troop carriers, six soldiers in addition to Fraser. Harbin was in the seat next to her. She’d had just enough time to grab some medical supplies and throw them in a bag and check on the girls. Tennant was still sleeping. Sophie was awake but unresponsive, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. With the medications, her temperature seemed to be holding around 102.
Fraser looked up from the documents in his hand. “Small town. A little more than four thousand residents on the edge of the Columbia River. Not much to speak of—couple stores on the main street, bank, car dealership. Several housing developments. Most near the water. Former mining town trying to reinvent itself.”
As he read, Martha noticed his arms for the first time. They were both covered in scars. There was an old burn covering most of his right forearm. On his left arm, he had a long surgical scar that started at his elbow and extended to his wrist. Most likely from a surgery to repair a break in the humerus. He’d seen his share of combat, there was no doubt about that. He had another scar on his neck. This one began just below his jawline and disappeared under the collar of his shirt. Unlike the surgical scar on his arm, this one was ragged, more of a tear. Most likely from shrapnel or an accident. In many ways, his body told a story, and not a pleasant one.
Fraser set the stack of pages on his knee and focused on Harbin. “I’ve spent a good portion of my career interrogating people. Taliban, ISIS, Afghans, South America. Gitmo…you know what they all have in common, Doctor?”
Harbin met his gaze.
Fraser went on. “The eyes. There’s always something in the eyes
. When questioning someone, I can always tell when they’ve told me everything or if they’re holding back. The best of liars can’t hide it. All they can do is try and mask it. You’re one of the better ones when it comes to concealing your thoughts. That’s not a skill you picked up in NOAA, is it, Doctor?”
A thin smile edged Harbin’s lips. “Did you come to that conclusion on your own or read something in my file?”
“A little bit of both.”
“What’s he talking about?” Martha turned to Harbin, her eyes narrowing.
Harbin’s gaze remained on Fraser. “I did a small stint in British intelligence before joining NOAA. That’s not exactly a secret. You can’t hide that sort of thing when applying for high clearance in the States. I’m sure the Lieutenant Colonel read the highlights. My past service may very well be why I was brought in here.”
“The good doctor was in training to be a spy,” Fraser said.
Harbin waved him off. “Hardly. I was barely an analyst. Even in my twenties, I didn’t have the fortitude for fieldwork. One of my professors at Cambridge felt I had a brain for the analytical and made several phone calls on my behalf. Before I knew it, I found myself working for Her Majesty. Long hours behind a desk writing reports nobody would ever read was hardly rewarding. I quit less than two years in, furthered my studies, and applied with NOAA.”
None of this was a surprise to Fraser. “But you also went through MI-5’s basic training program, which includes crash courses on interrogation techniques and deception.”
“Same as you, I suppose. Same as anyone who does a stint in a military branch.”
“That takes us back to my original point,” Fraser said bluntly. “You’re keeping something from me.”
Harbin gave Martha a quick glance, then turned back to Fraser. “I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning, so I haven’t. That’s all.”
Now Martha was curious. “What is it?”
“Anna Shim.”
“You know who she is?”
How could he, though? He’d seen the same information she had. Less, really.
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