by Anna Durand
She knew almost nothing for sure.
The tape whirred inside the player. She pressed the stop button.
Her throat was so dry it hurt. She trudged to the bathroom, where she found a shrink-wrapped plastic cup. After a brief battle with the shrink-wrap, she freed the cup and filled it from the tap. The water was lukewarm, but it quenched her thirst. She gulped down the cup's contents, refilled it, and took her beverage back to the bed. She booted up the laptop. Plugging in the flash drive, she waited for the password message to appear.
She understood why her grandfather had taken precautions. Still, she wished he hadn't made accessing the drive so difficult. How he expected her to know the password — and what he expected her to do once she accessed the drive's contents — she didn't know. He entrusted her with a secret that others would kill to possess. He believed she knew what to do about the mess, how to clean it up, where to seek help, who to trust.
He credited her with greater intelligence than she had. Her skills of deduction and logic couldn't solve the mystery and save the world. If she had those skills, she would've figured things out by now. Obviously, he overestimated her.
Forget the self-pity. Take command, girl. Grab the wheel and steer the damn car. So what if demons could take control of the car anytime. Don't make it easy for them to kill you. Claw. Scream. Fight.
Self-delivered pep talks weren't ideal. With nobody else around to bolster her flagging enthusiasm, however, she had to make do with the tools available to her. Stop whining, she chastised. Whatever must be done, she must do it. Whatever force kept foiling her, she must expose and neutralize it. Wherever she must go, she would get there somehow.
In front of her lay a precipice — behind, an army of demons. The time had come to jump.
The password. Grandpa must've programmed the drive with a password he felt certain she would know. How? Without any clues, she couldn't narrow down the possibilities. The password might be anything.
He would have left a clue.
She shut her eyes, thinking back to when she found the flash drive hidden inside the document frame. No clues there. The frame had looked normal, just glass and gold-colored metal. The diploma housed inside the frame was nothing special either. It held sentimental value, of course. Edward McLean had kept all three of his diplomas in his apartment, hung on the wall in the living room, right next a photograph of Stonehenge. She'd asked him once why he kept a picture of Stonehenge on his wall.
"It's simple," he'd said. "Stonehenge is a mystery that modern experts believe they've solved, but in reality they've misinterpreted much of the evidence to fit their preconceived ideas. It's the same with the human brain. Scientists believe they understand a great deal about how the mind works, yet they've misinterpreted or outright dismissed the most important evidence."
His answer still confused her. Comparing the brain to an ancient monument seemed like an apples-to-oranges issue. She'd told him as much.
He'd smiled and said, "The bluestone, Grace, the bluestone. It's the key to everything. People prattle on about the Rosetta Stone, but it's the bluestone that matters. Once we find the brain's bluestone, we'll have a real clue to work with."
"Bluestone?" she'd asked.
"Yes. Stonehenge contains a type of rock called bluestone, which the ancients quarried hundreds of miles from the Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge was constructed. Those ancient people transported the stones from the mountains down to the plain, supposedly without the wheel or beasts of burden."
"What's that got to do with the brain?"
"We won't know until we find the neurological bluestone."
She never had figured out what he meant. He could be outrageously cryptic when he felt like it.
Bluestone.
She looked at the computer screen, and the ENTER PASSWORD prompt displayed on its screen. Could that be the answer? It seemed too arcane.
Exactly the kind of thing Grandpa loved. The arcane and mysterious.
She typed BLUESTONE into the password field and hit enter.
The password box disappeared. A new message popped up in its place. This one didn't ask for a password. It displayed a single paragraph of text.
"This flash drive is dangerous," the note said. "Get rid of it ASAP. Contact Senator Elias Faulkner and arrange to transfer the drive to his custody. He'll know what to do with it. Then GET OUT of it, Grace. Do not get involved any further — I mean it. I'm sorry I had to involve you, but I had no way of getting the flash drive to Senator Faulkner myself. Please forgive me."
The note was signed "Grandpa."
Get out of it. Why the vehemence? He'd died before anyone or anything came after her. If he knew demons would try to kill her, he would've suggested she grab a shotgun and blast them into itty-bitty pieces. He would've warned her. And why give her clues that helped her figure out the password for the flash drive if he didn't want her to read its contents?
The note ordered her to stay out of it. David had issued the same command. Like she would obey a stranger. One who refused to explain himself. One who disappeared at will. Yet the more time she spent with him, the less he felt like a stranger.
The note was outdated. Given her predicament, Grandpa would want her to continue. Probably. She thought. Either way, his wishes no longer mattered. The situation had escalated too far for her to back out now, and she doubted she could back out anyway. Waldron seemed unlikely to leave her alone simply because she promised to stay out of his way — especially if she failed to turn over the flash drive. Clearly, Edward McLean had more enemies than he'd realized.
At least now she had a plan, sort of. She'd call Senator Faulkner, tell him what had happened, and ask for his help. If he refused, if he demanded she relinquish the flash drive, she'd hang up on him. The drive was her bulletproof vest. Possession of it warded off her enemies, at least for the moment. If she gave up the flash drive, nothing stood between her and the forces that wanted her dead. She already had an invisible someone who wanted her dead. She didn't need more demons nipping at her soul.
She closed the little window that displayed the note. A new window opened, this one a list of files contained on the flash drive. The files looked like spreadsheets or databases of information, along with a handful of text documents. She double-clicked on a file called "test sites." The spreadsheet that opened listed locations all over the world, from Seattle to Singapore, with abbreviations beside the place names — RV, AP, TK, PC, GP. The letters meant nothing to her, and the spreadsheet offered no explanation. Each location also had been designated as "active" or "inactive," but she couldn't tell what that meant either. As she scanned the list again, she realized only one of the locations was labeled "active," and that one wasn't really a location anyway. It was simply called "primary facility."
Brian Kellogg had mentioned working at a research facility. Could this "primary facility" be the same one?
She closed the file and opened one of the text documents. Fifty pages of dense text documented, in scientist-speak, the "protocols" for initiating "test episodes." Grace skimmed the document, but the sentences made no sense to her. She closed the file and tried another.
This text looked like a report of some kind, written in technical jargon way outside her expertise. The text was peppered with Latin phrases and extremely long words supposedly drawn from the English language, though she couldn't figure out what they meant. She tried looking up some of the words in an online dictionary, but apparently the terms were so arcane they didn't appear in a normal dictionary. The document also liberally used the abbreviations found in the spreadsheet.
She closed the document and skimmed the rest of the files. More gobbledygook. The last file was a database called "Interim Results." She selected a portion of the database labeled "RV" and scrolled through the contents, watching table after table of data roll across the computer screen. She saw numbers, symbols, incomprehensible text. Grap
hs interspersed between the tables and text illustrated "Rates of Incidence," "Projected Accuracy vs. Real-Time Accuracy," "Levels of Impulse Strength Over a 24-Hour Period," and more data that sounded like nonsense.
Giving up on the database, she opened the second to last file. It contained two pages scanned from a Time magazine profile of a man named Jackson Tennant, founder of Digital Prognostics, a company that produced security software for corporate, government, and consumer use. The company claimed their software detected potential security problems before they happened, hence the company's name. Prognostic meant able to predict the future.
Behind the article text, a photo of Jackson Tennant spread across the page and spilled onto the adjacent page. The photo showed a young man, perhaps thirty-five, lounging on the beach with a laptop computer beside him. A wind displaced his dark hair. Sunglasses masked his eyes. The sunlight on his face brought out the golden tones of his skin. He was attractive, in a spoiled-rich-boy way. The smirk on his lips intimated a disdain for the camera mingled with a craving for the attention it bestowed on him. He wore torn jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo for his company.
Digital Prognostics. What did the company have to do with anything? Her grandfather wouldn't have included the article on the flash drive unless it had some relation to the mystery at hand. She read the article again, more closely this time. Nothing relevant, not that she could see anyhow. The journalist salivated over Tennant's wealth and charm while criticizing his company's domination of the security software market, although Tennant also owned a number of subsidiaries involved in everything from manufacturing to, of all things, a cruise ship line. The article elucidated the government's anti-trust lawsuit against the company, which Tennant dismissed as "so completely lame." Charts illustrated the conglomerate's growth over the past five years, its current market share, and other information irrelevant to her problems.
She skimmed over a quote from Tennant, then doubled back to reread the statement.
"I want to change humanity forever," Tennant says. "My software is the tool I use to implement that change."
The statement struck her as odd and vaguely creepy, but she couldn't deduce a connection between the flash drive, her grandfather's research, and Digital Prognostics. Though Jackson Tennant might be a weirdo, that didn't make him a psychopath.
Something destined to change humanity forever.
Kellogg had spoken those words when describing the "something" her grandfather had left for her. A the time, she dismissed his words as the ramblings of a nutjob. Maybe she shouldn't have.
She double-clicked the last file on the drive.
Scrolling down. Tables. Data. Nonsense, all of it. She stopped at a table that listed names of "travelers," their "designations," and a number described as "accuracy." The list named two dozen people. Each name was a hot link to a page on a web site identified only by a string of numbers and dots that she recognized as an IP address. Scanning the names on the list, she froze. One was familiar.
Traveler: David Ransom. Designation: RV (Level 10). Accuracy: 97.9874.
She clicked the link. Even a cheap motel like this one offered free Wi-Fi, so her laptop had already detected the connection. The website loaded. A dialog box popped up requesting a username and password. Terrific. Another password.
A light flickered on her computer, indicating the hard drive was working. The username and password appeared in the dialog box. User name: Hermes. Password: Elysium.
The reference to Greek mythology baffled her. Hermes had been the messenger of the gods, Elysium a paradise akin to heaven. The password for the flash drive had been related to Stonehenge. What did any of it mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe her grandfather was just being arcane.
She hit enter. The password box disappeared, replaced by another dialog box. This one held a warning. "Access to this page requires fingerprint ID. Please place your thumb on the reader."
She doubted the word "reader" referenced a connoisseur of books. Damn, she'd left her fingerprint reader in her other purse, along with her retinal scanner and DNA tester.
Her laptop's hard drive whirred to life. The message on-screen changed. It now said, "Loading fingerprint file." A couple seconds ticked by, and then the dialog box closed. The web page loaded.
The page was titled "Status report." A subheading identified the "traveler" as David Ransom and repeated his designation. She read the next line.
The air in her lungs seemed to turn to cement. Her skin tingled as every hair on her body stiffened. No invisible assailant caused her symptoms this time around, though. Goose bumps raised on her arms because of what the next line of text said. It gave today's date, but what came next left her feeling cold and warm at the same time.
Status as of 0800 hours: In transit at main facility, Mojave Desert, California. Vital signs normal. Excursion ends 1200 hours.
Her vision blurred and refocused. The document claimed David was not a ghost, not a demon, not a hallucination. He was real. He lived and breathed somewhere in the Mojave Desert. He was "in transit at main facility," but the statement made no sense. How could he be "in transit" if he was at a facility? Maybe they got the wording wrong and meant he was in transit from the main facility.
She stared at the text on the web page. Vital signs normal. Excursion ends 1200 hours.
Excursion. Traveler. In transit. What in the hell had Grandpa gotten mixed up in? What had he gotten her mixed up in?
A chill curled around her neck. She wasn't alone. With her finger hovering over the laptop's touch pad, she looked at the door. No one there. The chill deepened, and she rubbed her arms through her jacket.
She whispered, "David?"
The cold slithered down her spine, around her chest. A breeze, like the breath of a ghost, touched her hand. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move. Her finger, poised over the touch pad, jerked.
She had not moved her finger. Not on purpose.
She felt downward pressure on her finger. Fighting the pressure didn't help. Her fingertip depressed the button on the touch pad. On-screen, the web browser closed.
She tried jerking her hand away. It ignored her commands and moved without her consent. Her finger clicked the touch pad button again. And again. The file window closed. The mouse pointer on-screen spun across the desktop and clicked an icon. A message announced that the media had been ejected successfully.
What the …
Her hand lifted off the touch pad and reached for the flash drive plugged into the USB port. She struggled against the force that had taken over her hand. Her arm froze, trembling. She gritted her teeth and concentrated her every thought on regaining control of her own hand. Her arm shook harder. The muscles cramped. Pain fired straight up her arm into her shoulder.
She gasped. Her breaths came shallow and fast, almost hyperventilating.
Her arm jerked.
She shivered from head to toe. Her teeth chattered. Her arm burned.
A voice cried out.
Her arm dropped onto her lap. She slumped against the headboard, panting, and looked around the room. No one was nearby.
A human had cried out. She'd heard the wail.
Maybe the voice had been her own. No. The voice had sounded male, young, and frightened — and eerily close.
The hairs on her neck stiffened.
A voice spoke inside her head. "I'm not supposed to let you look. I'm sorry."
The same voice that had cried out before.
He spoke in a soft, uneven tone. "I promised to watch over you. Not let bad things happen. That's why you can't look."
She glanced out the corners of her eyes. Maybe the kid was hiding in the bathroom. She leaped up to check the bathroom, but it was empty. No one lurked in the shadows. She knew he was nowhere in the building. Nowhere in the state of Texas. He probably lived at the "main facility" in the Mojave Desert with David. D
idn't take a clairvoyant to conclude that much. The voice belonged to the young man who'd healed her back in the hospital.
Standing beside the bed now, she listened for the fragile voice.
"Understand?" he said.
He was pleading for her agreement. She opened her mouth to speak but stopped. The kid could talk to her in her mind. Maybe she could communicate with him the same way.
Sure, I'll just beam my thoughts to him like a goddamn radio transmitter. No problem.
Bullshit. She was no psychic. Her only option for communicating with other beings was to do it the old-fashioned way.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Silence.
Frustration boiled inside her, but she slammed a lid on it. "I'm Grace, but I think you already know that. Please tell me your name."
His voice echoed in her mind, as real as if he stood before her. "Sean Vandenbrook."
"Are you with David?"
"Not supposed to say. Said too much already."
He was gone.
She sensed his absence rather than his departure. Couldn't explain why. Couldn't explain anything. She had conversed with a boy named Sean, in her head, over a distance of more than a thousand miles.
Grace shivered.
Grabbing the flash drive, she tucked it inside her bra. No man would think to look there, or at least she hoped they wouldn't. Sean said he wasn't supposed to let her look. At what? The flash drive, she assumed, since Sean had forced her to eject it from the computer. The order had come from David, no doubt. But she couldn't figure out why he sent a kid to stop her from looking at the flash drive. Until now, he had watched over her. Annoyed her. Evaded her questions.
Saved her life.
Maybe he was in trouble. Not that she cared. Her concern didn't signify anything personal. She wanted no one to get hurt, not Sean, not David, not anyone.
Excluding the person who murdered Grandpa. She prayed he would suffer.
David sought to prevent her from looking at the flash drive. He wanted her uninvolved. To hell with what he wanted. She needed answers. She needed the truth. She needed to ensure the murderer paid for his crime. To accomplish that, she needed more information.
