“Nope. Uh-uh. That thing will sink like a rock if we get in it—and have you noticed the charming bacterial stew floating around these pilings?”
“The nanomites must have a plan, Gamble, or they wouldn’t have told us to use this piece of junk.”
Gamble glanced from the mortally wounded boat to the ship out in the inlet—the ship where Trujillo was undoubtedly suffering for her silence.
He cracked his neck. “Right. Let’s do this.”
He and Zander lifted the lightweight boat and flipped it over. From under it, a nest of disturbed rats squealed and scurried in every direction.
I about lost it right there. When a particularly gross specimen ran across my foot—its little claw-like feet scrabbling and scratching my shoe—I had to stuff my fist into my mouth to keep from shrieking.
Zander kicked a few of the slower rats off the dock and shifted his end of the boat toward the water.
“Keep it together, Jay.”
I was too busy chewing on my knuckles to answer.
“Hey! Watch your step, Cruz.”
Zander looked down and found his foot halfway over a hole in a dock plank. “Thanks, man.”
“So, we’re dropping this thing in the water, right? Are you sure?”
“Yup.”
The tide was out so the water line was several feet below the dock. Zander and Gamble got on their knees on the dock’s mucky surface and grasped their ends of the aluminum boat.
“I’m burning these trousers when we’re done,” Gamble declared.
“If you don’t, I’m siccing the EPA on you.”
They lowered the boat toward the water and let it fall the last foot—where it bobbed complacently.
Gamble was stunned. “How’s that possible?”
Zander understood. “The nanomites are filling the hole. Come on, we need to get in—I don’t know how long they can maintain the plug.”
“You don’t know how long they can maintain the plug? But ‘Come on, we need to get in’? No freaking way.”
Zander ignored Gamble and, placing his hands on the slimy dock edge, dropped into the boat. “Ready, Jay?”
“Yeah.” I grasped Zander’s shoulders and let him pull me to him. The boat began to drift away from the dock.
“Come on, Gamble.”
He shook his head. “Nope. Besides this being totally impossible, how do you plan to get us out to the ship? No motor. No paddles.”
“Watch.” I held my palm to the water on the far side of the boat, away from the dock and toward the inlet. A spurt of electricity struck the water and it churned. In response, the boat edged closer to the dock.
“See?”
Gamble started to rub his face with his hand but stopped himself in time. “Gah!”
Without further protest, he climbed down into the boat and wiped his palms on his doomed trousers. Zander pushed us off, and he and I crouched in the stern, our palms toward the water behind us. The thick, murky water boiled, and our little craft moved toward our destination, riding lightly over the swells, leaving little wake.
It wasn’t a large ship from a distance. Up close it was considerably more daunting. No lights appeared as we approached, but we saw our adversaries’ motorboat tied up to a ladder. We nudged their boat aside and tied on, so we could reach the ladder.
Zander climbed up first and disappeared over the side. A moment later, his head appeared above us. He motioned to us.
When the three of us were standing on the ship’s deck, the nanomites instructed us further.
Jayda Cruz, proceed with caution amidships on the port side. You’ll find a closed bulkhead door. The satellite video shows our targets entering the ship there.
We found the door—a corroded slab of metal with a wheel for a handle. As far as we and the nanomites knew, the man and woman who had snatched Trujillo—and Trujillo herself—were the only people on board.
“I’ll lead the way,” I whispered.”
“What? No, either Gamble or I should go first,” Zander protested.
Gamble shook his head. “Nope, don’t look at me. Honestly? I don’t want to be between those guys downstairs and you two—what with you-all shooting bolts of electricity. I’m happy to take the rear and watch our six.”
“Look, Zander, I have more experience with . . . this kind of stuff.” I touched his hand. “I need you close behind me in case I miss something.”
It was mildly manipulative, appealing to another facet of his protective instincts, but it was also true. I did have more experience with the nanomites in “combat” situations—and I did want him checking for what I might miss.
“Fine,” he growled, “but I’m sticking to you like glue.”
He placed his hands on the door’s wheel. The door was as rust- and crud-rimed as the rest of the ship; Zander’s first crank on the wheel produced a scree of protest. Our efforts to approach undetected were about to end.
Zander Cruz, let us open the door.
“Yeah. Be my guest, Nano.”
It took the nanomites several minutes to noiselessly ease the door open. Gamble secured the open door to the bulkhead, so it wouldn’t swing closed on us—leaving us lost in the ship’s utterly black interior.
I hesitated.
The Lord is my light and my salvation, Jayda Cruz. Whom shall I fear?
“Uh, right, Nano.” I stepped over the doorsill into the unlit passageway. Turns out, I need not have feared the darkness: A glow near my shins lit the way a foot or so ahead—and the memory of another dark night—lost and stumbling my way down the flanks of a mountain—washed over me. Shaking myself, I pushed into the passageway, Zander and Gamble close behind.
I soon came to a ladder leading down into the hold. We could continue ahead or go down. I gritted my teeth and touched a rail on the ladder. The nanomites would be able to detect skin cells on the rails and tell me if human hands had recently touched it.
“Which way did they take her, Nano?” I was really hoping they’d say “ahead” and not “down.”
They took the ladder, Jayda Cruz.
“Well, of course they did.”
“I will praise you, Lord my God . . . you have delivered me from the depths, from the realm of the dead.”
“Nice word play, Nano. Comforting, too.” More sarcasm.
Clenching my jaw, I grasped the goobery rails and descended into the bowels of the ship—vowing to scrub myself raw with a gallon of antibacterial soap after we got out of here.
When the three of us were assembled at the bottom of the ladder, the way forward became clearer: From far down the passageway, faint light and the echo of voices reached out to us.
A minute later, we saw another bulkhead door hanging partially open. I stuck my finger around its frame; Zander and I saw what the nanomites “saw” in that brief glimpse.
The compartment had been the ship’s mess. A steel table and two benches that had once been riveted to the cabin’s deck were shoved against the bulkhead to make room for the compartment’s present use: Agent Trujillo dangled from the overhead by her wrists. Her unconscious body sagged forward. Her face was a bruised, bloody mess; her shirt hung in tatters.
Trujillo’s two interrogators were the cabin’s only other occupants. I was happy to note their fatigue and exasperation. Trujillo had not been as easy to break as they had figured she would be. Maybe we’d arrived in time after all.
“What next?” Zander whispered in my ear.”
“This.”
I held my palms toward each other. A spark ignited; my hands trembled and shook as fire arced between them and grew. Then blue current snapped and crackled around us, building, rising, turning the passageway from the depths of night to brightest day.
From within the cabin, the man shouted, “What the *bleep* is that?”
Zander grabbed the door and threw it all the way open and, surrounded by a shield of nanomites, I stepped over the sill. The man fired his gun three times, but the nanomites deflected the round
s. A bolus of electricity shot from my hand to the man. The force of the bolt launched him across the compartment where he crumpled against the bulkhead. With a similar move, I dispatched the woman.
As I began to power down, Zander and Gamble reached Trujillo. They lifted her bound wrists from the hook in the overhead and laid her on the deck.
“She’s alive.” Gamble’s relief warred with his fury. “We need to get her to a hospital right away.”
Jayda Cruz. You are being watched.
We hadn’t noticed the tablet positioned on a bench—a tablet in video chat mode. Someone had been witnessing Trujillo’s interrogation.
That same someone had seen us enter and dispatch her captors!
I grabbed the tablet. On its video screen, I glimpsed part of a face—and then a hand grabbed the device on the other end. A second later, the video feed ended in static.
“They pulled the network connection. Nano! Can you trace the location of this call?”
Negative, Jayda Cruz. There is no cellular service out here. The tablet had to have been using a satellite feed to stream the interrogation.
“Can you piggyback onto the tablet’s satellite feed?”
No. The feed was terminated at its source. We will back-check the tablet’s call logs and attempt to identify the device on the other end when we are again within cellular data range.
“Come on,” Gamble growled. “We got what we came for. We need to get Trujillo away from here.”
Zander gestured to our unconscious prisoners. “What do we do with these two?”
“We’ll take their boat and let ours sink. They won’t be able to leave. I’ll send someone for them later—hopefully, they’ll have information we can use.”
Zander wanted to help Gamble with Trujillo’s limp form, but Gamble was having none of that. He slung Trujillo over his shoulder like a sack of flour—then noticed me watching him.
I had to be wearing a bemused expression.
“What?”
“I was just remembering . . . you hauling me up the mountain and into the tunnels when I was nearly dead. Don’t know if I ever thanked you properly.”
“My lot in life, I guess.” He jerked his chin at Zander. “Head up the ladder. I’ll hand her up to you.”
Zander ran into the passageway to follow Gamble’s orders.
Before I left the cabin to follow them, I confiscated the tablet and pointed to Trujillo’s former captors. “Nano, take care of them.”
The nanomites would expunge our prisoners’ most recent synapses; Trujillo’s interrogators would remember nothing of my attack—but those who had been watching via the video call? There was nothing we could do about them.
Up on the main deck, we had to figure out how to get Trujillo safely down into her captors’ boat. It took some maneuvering, but we got it handled. Gamble laid Trujillo on the bottom of the boat and squatted next to her. I positioned myself in the bow, above Trujillo’s head. Before Zander sat in the stern, he untied the aluminum craft. Then he started our new boat’s electric motor and pointed the bow toward the docks.
As we pulled away from the rusting ship, the nanomites released their “patch” on the aluminum boat, and I watched it sink into the dark water.
Gamble, no longer sensible to the slime around us, unbuttoned his dress shirt and took it off. I lifted Trujillo’s shoulders. Together, we managed to get his shirt under her bloody shoulders. She groaned once and then was silent.
“Jayda, can the nanomites do anything to help Janice?” Gamble asked.
“I think so.” I turned inward. “Nano, how is Agent Trujillo? What can you do for her before we get her to a hospital?”
In addition to cuts and bruising over her back, Agent Trujillo has sustained multiple broken fingers and facial bones and facial contusions of a serious nature. She will require surgery. We are monitoring her vital signs and cauterizing bleeds as quickly as we can.
“They’re stopping the bleeds, Gamble, but she needs surgery.”
I was focused on Trujillo until a soft choking noise made me glance up at Gamble. I hadn’t seen him like this before—and I don’t mean disheveled and clad in a t-shirt. The way his eyes were fixed on Trujillo, how he’d called her “Janice,” and the strangled sound in his throat told me more than he probably realized.
When we reached the docks, Gamble insisted we put Trujillo on the back seat of his car, and he asked me to drive. I wasn’t surprised when he sat in the back with Trujillo’s head cradled on his lap. As we slowly wound our way out of the ship graveyard, the nanomites located the nearest trauma center. We sped from the marshy coast, the mites providing turn-by-turn directions down a back road that would eventually intersect with a state highway. Zander, driving our car, followed close behind us.
“WE’VE LOST TRUJILLO.”
Danforth and his companion had followed Trujillo’s interrogation from a specially equipped and shielded room within a farmhouse that sat on a wooded lot in the Virginia countryside, some thirty miles west of D.C. When the unfamiliar young woman had exploded into the ship’s mess hall and, with what appeared like lightning bolts shooting from her hands, had dispatched Trujillo’s captors, Danforth had nearly lost control of his bladder.
His companion, however, had not so much as flinched. She had leaned toward the screen, fascinated. Even when two men had followed the woman into the ship’s mess and proceeded to take down Trujillo’s unconscious body and ease her to the deck, Danforth’s companion had not moved or displayed emotion other than rapt attention.
Moments later, when Trujillo’s rescuers noticed the tablet that was live streaming the interrogation, Danforth’s companion had calmly yanked the network cable from their laptop, terminating the feed. She had acted quickly, exhibiting the cool response for which she had once been legend in the field.
Then she had proceeded to pace the room they were shut up in, to close herself off from her surroundings and think—another behavior for which she was known.
He repeated, “We’ve lost Trujillo and our link to this Keyes woman.”
Roused from her contemplation, she paused to level a jeer of disdain in his direction. “Have we, indeed?”
Danforth had the annoying habit of stating the obvious.
The woman’s amber eyes smoldered. “Actually, I do not consider the intervention to be a loss. Rather, what we witnessed tells us more than Trujillo ever would have. We’ve seen for ourselves that Cushing’s preposterous claims about the nanomites were true—and more.”
She folded her hands together. “Since we know that Gemma Keyes escaped the explosion Cushing caused and is alive, the woman we saw on the video call must be her, must be Gemma Keyes in a clever and convincing disguise. Who else could it be? So! We have definitive proof: Keyes is alive, she has the nanomites, and the nanomites have given her powers we have only dreamed of.”
Her mouth curved with cunning satisfaction. “And while I did not know this mystery woman with the amazing abilities, did you, perhaps, recognize either of her companions?”
“No, I don’t think so. Only caught a glimpse of them at the end.”
“Ah, then let me enlighten you, Lawrence: One of the men was Zander Cruz—Gemma Keyes’ former boyfriend. My people in Albuquerque tell me he is now married to one Jayda Cruz. Ergo, we may presume that we have now “met” Jayda Cruz and that she and Gemma Keyes are one and the same.”
She strode up and down the room again, then pivoted on her heel. “I wish you to sterilize the black site, Lawrence, and then locate and capture Jayda Cruz and her companions.”
“They could be anywhere.”
Her contempt turned his stomach to gelatin. “How many vehicles do you think left the black site this evening, Lawrence? They can’t have gone far, and they will be seeking medical attention for Agent Trujillo. You are second in command of the most powerful intelligence organization in the world—use it.”
He ground his teeth. “I risk exposing myself by tasking NSA resources for unsa
nctioned operations.”
“Then you must be discreet. Lawrence. Use only vetted personnel we can trust, but get it done. This woman is key to our achieving our long-term objectives.”
Chapter 27
WE BROKE FREE OF THE graveyard’s twisting labyrinth, back into the dark, winding dirt tracks of the coastal islands. Even with the nanomites’ sure directions, it took us a while to reach a state road not much better than what we’d left—except that it had, at one time, been paved. When my tires hit the pitted and crumbling asphalt, I punched the gas. No bueno. The rough road forced me to slow down.
Gamble’s voice came from the back seat. “Gemma?”
I didn’t have the heart to correct him. “Yeah?”
“They saw you in action. The people watching on the tablet.”
“I know.”
“And I doubt that they can afford to let Trujillo go free after what they did to her. I had you drive because they may be setting up roadblocks . . . or sending aircraft to find us. To waylay us. I’m counting on you . . . you and Zander.”
“We’ll keep you and Trujillo safe, Gamble.”
Yeah, things might work out tonight, but it wouldn’t be as easy going forward. Had the unknown viewers gleaned any identifying information on Zander or myself from the video call? The smallest detail had the potential—the strong probability—of blowing our covers to oblivion.
Goodbye Jayda and Zander Cruz.
We must have left the cellular dead zone, because I heard Gamble dial his phone. “Mal? I’m in deep water, brother, and need your help.”
Mal? Of course—old military buddies. Loyal to a fault. I didn’t hear what Mal had to say, but it was short. After that, Gamble issued curt, precise instructions.
“I’m sending you the location of a mothballed ship. It’s out in the water a couple hundred yards from the nearest dock. Dispatch a small team. You’ll need an inflatable to reach the ship. You’ll find two targets, male and female, below deck. We’ve disarmed them, but it’ll be a race to beat their handlers to them.”
Gamble listened. “Yeah, we want them for what they know, so have your people hide them well. Right now, we’re on our way to the nearest trauma center, and I need the rest of your team for security there. Yes. Thanks, man. Hold on for the location of the ship and directions to the hospital.”
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