“What about before that?” Tony asked.
Ahmed looked to the ceiling as he recalled events. “We got here right after you left,” he said. “The coffeepot was still warm. We saw where you went on Google Maps.”
Francesca’s breath caught in her throat. The others exchanged furtive glances.
Tony said, “You’re talking about Victor’s residence?”
“I guess. It was a mansion by the lake.” When he seemed to sense the mood change in the room, he quickly added, “I told them we couldn’t go there! We saw the empty ammunition boxes in the garbage. Why would they…” His voice caught, his eyes widened, and he looked out the picture window.
But Francesca was already three steps ahead of him. Her children had been alone when the sky had erupted in light. They would have known Uncle Tony was close by. They would have run to him.
Ahmed’s voice was pained. “But they shouldn’t have gone there. I told them it was dangerous. If anything went wrong, they were supposed to call me on the phone.”
“Phone?” Marshall and Timmy said simultaneously. Marshall stood so fast that Ahmed took a sudden step back.
“Uh, yeah. We picked up two pay-as-you-go phones before we left Venice.”
“Let me see,” Marshall said. The fingers of his hands twitched like a kid about to get a chocolate bar.
“It’s in my backpack,” Ahmed said, leading him toward the dining room.
Timmy’s fingers moved quickly over the computer keyboard as he hacked into the site he needed. He didn’t look up when he asked, “Do you remember their phone number?”
“Yes,” Ahmed said. “It’s programmed on that phone.”
“Excellent,” Marshall said, examining the phone. “Good, it’s GPS enabled.”
While the three of them huddled over the computer, the rest rose to their feet in the sitting area. Francesca leaned into Jake for support, one arm entwined in his.
“I thought the cell service was down,” Francesca said.
“It may be overloaded,” Jake said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s down.”
“As long as the battery is installed, they’ll be able to lock on to their location,” Lacey said. “They did that in my last film.” She took Francesca’s free hand. “Don’t worry. We’ll find them.”
The swell of hope she felt was cut short by the grim expression on Tony’s face.
“What is it?” Francesca asked.
His lips thinned.
Tony’s hesitancy made her angry. She let go of Jake and Lacey and stepped to face him, hands on her hips. “The world is on fire, my father may be dead, for all I know, and my children are lost. I have no feelings left to spare, Tony. So don’t try. Avete capito?”
“Yeah, I understand. And you’re right. We’re all in this together, come hell or”—he pointed out the window toward the sky—“high water.” He waited a beat before continuing. His tone stiffened. “As we were leaving the residence, more of Victor’s men were coming up the drive. Sarafina is a resourceful young girl, so I’m hoping she steered clear. But if she didn’t…”
Lacey said, “If those creeps took them, there’s no telling where they could be.”
“It doesn’t matter where they are,” Jake said evenly. There was a menacing edge to his voice that caused Francesca to flinch. His eyes seem to be focused a thousand miles away. The room quieted. Even the guys at the dining table stopped what they were doing.
“We’ll find them,” Jake said. “You have my word. If they avoided being taken at the residence, so much the better. But if Victor’s men did take them, know this—they won’t be harmed. At least not until Victor’s got me strapped in a chair to watch. And that’s okay, too. Because I intend to sit in that chair one last time anyway. I will save the children. And I will stop Victor Brun.”
Jake’s steeled gaze focused on each of them, one at a time. Francesca imagined it was the same expression that a defiant prisoner might have when spitting in the face of his executioner. His eyes didn’t soften until they settled on hers. He gripped her shoulders. The connection was instantaneous. He was in her mind; she was in his. It had been six years since she’d last been linked to him like this. But she hadn’t forgotten what it felt like: the power of his life force, the sense of peace, the intense attraction of spirit and body. Squeezing her flesh, he said, “Whatever it takes.”
He released her. The spell was broken. But the promise still warmed her blood.
Tony placed a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “And this time you ain’t going in alone,” he said.
“That’s right,” Lacey said, hands on her hips.
“Hell yes!” Marshall chimed in from the dining table.
Timmy high-fived him and said, “I’m in!”
Francesca wondered at Ahmed’s hesitation. He squared his shoulders and watched her. There was no fear emanating from him. Instead, she saw in him a strong sense of purpose. He seemed to be looking to her for something. She thought she understood. He held his fervor in check, awaiting her lead. Out of respect. Out of love. She nodded, more to herself than to him. Her jaw tightened. She wiped both eyes with a rough pull of her wrists. The time for crying had passed. She fixed her resolve, balled her fists, and said, “Whatever it takes!”
“Whatever it takes,” Ahmed said, his fist clenched overhead.
“Whatever it takes!” the rest of them shouted.
Chapter 60
Geneva, Switzerland
HERE WE GO again, Jake thought. I’ve been back in their lives for less than two days, and already Mario is critically wounded, the children are missing, and the rest of them have gathered around me to face down a challenge better suited for a world of armies.
They were spread out around the dining room table. Timmy was attempting to hack into the laptop that they’d grabbed from Victor’s residence. Marshall hovered over the other laptop. He’d taken on the task of isolating the location of Sarafina’s phone. Though nothing had been said between them, Jake sensed the underlying competition to see who’d be finished first. Their fingers blurred over the keyboards. Lacey filled cups from a fresh-brewed pot of coffee.
Francesca sat on one side of Jake, with Tony and Ahmed on the other. They listened intently while Jake filled them in on what had happened at the Palace of Nations. He told them what he’d learned about Victor Brun and the Order. Each layer of information added weight to the tension in the room. At one point Francesca felt compelled to get up and pace around the table, arms crossed, deep in thought. Jake lowered his eyes when he got to the part about his rage at the sight of her death. But he didn’t leave anything out, including the ease with which he’d taken the lives of the men in the chair room. They deserved to know it all.
When he was finished, it was Lacey who spoke first. “Sounds like the son of a bitch has got his fingers in a lot of pies.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Brun and his pals have had a thousand years to get ready. We already know he’s got plants at high levels in some governments. The Russians, for one.”
Timmy didn’t stop typing when he added, “The US, too. Remember, they didn’t have any trouble getting an assassin into our top secret facility in order to try to kill Jake.”
“Not to mention Interpol,” Francesca added.
Ahmed was looking out the window. “Something’s happened!” he said. “Everybody’s running.”
Lacey moved beside him. “He’s right. It looks like chaos just graduated to pandemonium.”
“Switch on the TV,” Jake said.
“Already done,” Marshall replied, holding the remote.
They gathered in front of the fifty-inch flat-screen.
The images and videos that filled the screen were horrific. It was an ever-changing slide show that depicted death and destruction on a massive scale: gruesome images of heaping piles of dead bodies, drawn from the archives of recorded history. There were battlefields ridden with the mangled ruins of life, and endless lines of victims being herded for slaughter, toward gas
chambers, firing lines, or worse. There was no sound track. None was necessary.
Francesca and Lacey collapsed onto the couch. Francesca had a hand to her mouth as if to prevent some evil from reaching inside. Marshall shrank to Lacey’s side, pulling her close. Ahmed moved beside Francesca.
Jake couldn’t join them. His focus remained glued to the screen. He knew what was coming.
Marshall pointed the remote at the screen, switching from channel to channel. It was the same on every station: burned-out villages and towns. Smoke-filled streets strewn with bodies. Dogs licking at the charred and curled remains of children. Gut-wrenching scenes of abuse and murder from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Several sketched images depicted the slow but steady slaughter of American Indians by US settlers. It went on and on. No deplorable secret was left uncovered. All was revealed for the world to see.
“Where are they getting all this from?” Lacey muttered, referring to the alien objects.
“If they can override broadcast signals around the world, it’d be a piece of cake for them to access our databases,” Marshall said. “Hell, they’re probably tapped into the Library of Congress.”
The sad truth was that it could stream for months and never show the same image or video twice, Jake thought. And that was the lesson of it. It was as if the lead prosecutor for the mother of all trials was laying out his evidence.
Jake felt hollow inside. Who was he in this macabre play if not the “inside man” who’d betrayed his people to the court?
The theme of the images shifted to wars. Embedded videos of modern battles mingled with artistic renderings of ancient conflicts. In either case, it was still violence on an immense scale, veiled in the name of country or religion, but motivated by greed and the hunger for power and wealth. The Crusades, the “Holy” Roman Empire, the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan. The World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so many more. Chemical warfare, carpet bombs, napalm…
The nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The message was clear: No country on Earth had been spared the violence. And none could claim innocence from wielding it.
Judgment cast, Jake thought. Mankind has been found guilty.
As if to accent his conclusion, a digital timer suddenly appeared in the top-right corner of the screen. It glowed with the same color as the lines in the sky. It read 40H:00M:00S.
They all held their breath.
A beat later, the clock switched to 39H:59M:59S.
Seconds continued to tick off.
The countdown to the annihilation of mankind had begun.
Jake walked to the TV and switched it off. He turned to face his friends. He crossed his arms, kept his mouth shut, and waited.
Eyes narrowed, bodies shifted. Francesca locked gazes with Jake. He sensed her probing his emotions, and he welcomed it. He had nothing to hide. The others respected the moment with their silence. Jake caught the subtle changes in her expression. Her lips tightened, her jaw jutted forward, and the fear in her eyes was replaced with fierce determination. She riveted him with a fervent stare.
Finally, she rose to her feet. “This changes nothing,” she said flatly. “I’m going to make another pot of coffee. We’ve much planning to do.”
Her unflinching reaction seemed to fuel the fire within them all.
Jake used his thumb to point at her as she strode to the kitchen. “That’s my girl,” he said with more than a little pride.
Ahmed mimicked the motion and said, “That’s my mom!”
“You go, girl,” Lacey said.
Tony nodded in agreement. “So where were we?” he said, making his way back to the dining table. The others followed. Marshall and Timmy resumed their work on the computers.
“Talking about Victor,” Lacey said. “He figures that his group—the Order—is going to be spared extermination. How is he going to make that happen?”
“Good question,” Jake said. “But he seemed real sure of himself on that score.”
“They’d need an isolated location,” Tony said. “To keep their population out of harm’s way.”
“You’re talking about a mass exodus,” Francesca said from the kitchen. “Entire families.”
“There could be hundreds of them,” Lacey said.
“More like thousands,” Jake said.
Marshall made a final keystroke entry. Then he sat back and clenched and unclenched his fingers. He watched the screen as if waiting for a program to load. He glanced up and said, “Which means they’d need an effective means of telling friend from foe. They can’t possibly know everyone personally, especially if they’re scattered across the globe.”
Timmy seemed oblivious to Marshall’s comment. His keystrokes seemed to grow more frantic. He was totally engrossed in the machine.
Ahmed said, “Sort of like a secret handshake?”
“Yeah,” Tony said, catching on. “But higher-tech. Facial recognition or something like that.”
Jake recalled how Victor’s men communicated. “They have some sort of embedded comm devices. I’ve seen them press a spot just beneath their ears when they communicate.”
“Military-grade implantable comm units,” Tony said. “Very high-tech.”
“They can do that?” Lacey asked.
“Are you kidding?” Marshall said. “Intel is working on a brain-implant chip that will allow you to enter data into a computer simply by thinking it. They expect it to be ready by the year 2020. It won’t be long after that until it’s adios, cell phones.”
The mention of a brain implant sparked a knowing look between Jake and Ahmed.
Marshall continued, “But for now, the communication implant you’re talking about is still a serious surgery. No big deal for the field operatives, but overkill for the families. They’d need something simpler than that for tracking and identification purposes.” His computer beeped. He made a quick entry and added, “Something that would provide each individual with a unique identifier.”
Lacey said, “What’s wrong with an ID card?”
“Too easy to forge,” Ahmed said, drawing on his recent experience.
“I’m in!” Timmy said excitedly. His fingers tapped in an organized frenzy on Victor’s computer. He paused a moment, his eyes scanning a document. Another entry, another document, then he started typing again. This went on for several moments. Finally, whimpers leaked from his throat, increasing in frequency with the speed of his keystrokes. Then all at once he lifted his hands in the air. His jaw was set, his eyes burned with intensity, and he pointedly dropped an index finger on the ENTER key. A beat later, he did a Tiger Woods–style fist pump and shouted, “Yes!” He spun the laptop around so everyone could see the screen. “And I know just how they’re doing it!”
Jake leaned forward to get a closer look. It was a satellite map of Geneva. There were several clusters of blinking lights overlaid onto the map.
“It’s a tracking system,” Timmy said. He placed the cursor over one of the lights, and a rectangular window popped up with an alphanumeric string. “Military-grade RFIDs. The same sort of thing that they use in consumer products. Except this is an active system, meaning it transmits a wireless signal. They have a limited range, but if they’re piggybacked onto the cellular system, then they can be tracked anywhere there’s coverage. They’re easily embedded under the skin using a modified vaccine gun.”
“Each of those dots is a person?” Ahmed asked, pointing to the screen.
“Yep.”
Tony pointed at a small cluster of four lights. “That’s Victor’s residence.”
But Jake was focused on the twenty or more blips bunched within the Palace of Nations. “This isn’t a live feed.”
“No,” Timmy said, pointing at the digital clock in the corner of the screen. “This was recorded about an hour ago. But I can fast-forward.” He made an entry, and the blips started to move.
They watched as the scene u
nfolded: Several blips of light at the palace sped northward toward a waiting cluster of blips at the airport. The four lights at the residence jiggled somewhat but remained on the property. Three more lights traveled to the residence, hesitated a moment, and departed on a track toward the airport. The remaining lights at the palace were starting to exit the complex, when every light on the screen suddenly disappeared.
“What happened?” Lacey asked.
“That’s gotta be just after the launch,” Timmy said. “When the cell system was overloaded.” He rewound to the point just before the lights vanished.
Tony said, “They were hightailing to the airport—”
“Oh, no,” Marshall interjected, staring at his own laptop. He looked as if the wind had gotten knocked out of him. “I located Sarafina’s cell phone,” he said softly. He slid his laptop around so that it was alongside Timmy’s. It depicted the same Google map of Geneva. He pointed to a glowing icon containing the phone number on the disposable phone. “This was her last location before the overload.”
There were gasps around the table. It was the exact same spot as that of the three blips that had departed the residence toward the airport.
Victor’s men had grabbed the children.
The room grew silent. Eyes turned to Francesca. Jake squeezed her hand, but the tremble he expected wasn’t there. He sensed the despair that boiled beneath the surface of her stern expression. But she pushed it aside like an army general planning his next move after a failed battle.
“So how do we find them?” she asked evenly.
Jake compartmentalized the swell of admiration he felt for her. He’d act on that later. For now, another part of his mind had already grasped the solution. He pointed at Timmy’s screen. “Zoom all the way out.”
Timmy placed the cursor on the minus-sign end of the zoom bar and clicked six or seven times. With each click, the satellite image zoomed outward to capture a larger view: the snowcapped Alps, Switzerland, Europe, Asia, and Africa, the world…
Blinking lights covered the globe.
“Son of a bitch,” Tony muttered.
“Holy crap,” Marshall said.
Brainrush 03 - Beyond Judgment Page 23
