Earth was home to almost two hundred sovereign countries, including dictatorships, democratic republics, theocracies, and constitutional monarchies, among others. And in every one of these countries, within every government, a frenzy of activity was taking place.
No one knew exactly what the alien craft would do once it arrived at its destination. But it was clear that whichever country controlled it might well control the secrets of the universe. It could contain a computer with blueprints for technology thousands of years more advanced than human technology. Even if it only—only—yielded the secret of zero point energy, the advantages this would give the country who discovered it were immeasurable.
So if it did come down to earth, where would it land? If its landing were random, it would most likely end up in the sea, which covered more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface. If it came down on land, the largest countries by land mass were Russia, Canada, the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia.
But even the largest countries were well aware that the chance of it landing inside of their borders was small. For all anyone knew, it might set down in one of the smallest countries, like Tuvalu, Macau, or Monaco. The cosmos had a way of playing absurd statistical tricks on mankind. And if it happened to land in the world’s smallest country, Vatican City—which comprised less than a square kilometer of the earth’s surface—what would that mean? Or the Western Wall in Jerusalem? Or the Taj Mahal? Would this validate the religious beliefs embodied by these locations?
The level and intensity of communication between allies and enemies alike was unprecedented. Each government jockeyed for position. None held back a single card in whatever hand history had dealt them. Seen by an omniscient observer, the maneuverings would look like a two hundred piece game of chess, played in fifteen dimensions. Only more complicated.
Endless simulations were run. If the ship landed within the borders of a major military power, all other major powers would almost certainly ally in an attempt to take it away. If it landed in a small, helpless country, the world would be thrown into chaos as all other nations battled to take it by forging complex alliances, or using their own economic, political, or military power—like two hundred starving hyenas fighting over the scraps of a wildebeest.
In the end the complexity of trillions of possibilities quickly boiled down to an elegant simplicity. Regardless of where it landed, and what alliances were struck, the ending would be the same: chaos and disaster.
There was only one simulation that worked. If all the countries of the world agreed beforehand to cooperate. If every government—Islamic fundamentalist, socialist, and democratic republic alike—agreed that wherever the alien ship landed, it would be the property of the world, examined by representatives of each of the world’s countries.
Different countries arrived at this conclusion at different speeds, but they all got there eventually. As more and more governments signed on, even the most independent, reluctant regimes had no choice but to do so as well. No nation could stand alone against the world. Or take the chance of not being a part of first contact with an envoy from an advanced alien species.
26
Kira found a paperclip in the top drawer of Jake’s desk and unwound it. With her hands so close together, cutting through the hardened plastic around her wrists was nearly impossible, even if she found a knife or scissors, but Desh had taught her how to remove these restraints with a paperclip or pin. Some magicians had incorporated this more modern mode of handcuffing into their acts, since freeing oneself from metal handcuffs had been done so many times it was no longer interesting. Success required a high level of skill and precision, but Desh had drilled her on the technique until she could perform it even with her normal intelligence.
Plastic handcuffs were simple in design. They were slipped around a prisoner’s wrists and ratcheted tight by threading the ends of the plastic straps through a centered retaining block. But the ratchet system housed in the sugar-cube sized plastic block could be disabled by shoving a paperclip inside in a precise way, between the roller lock and the teeth on the straps. Once this was done, the straps would slide out, almost as easily as they had slid in.
Kira calmly freed herself and dropped the intact plastic handcuffs on the floor. She lifted the photograph Jake had not wanted seen, although she was nearly certain of who it depicted. As expected, it turned out to be a young girl, probably ten or eleven years old. It didn’t take an amplified intellect to figure this out. This was the daughter Jake spoke of to Kolke. The colonel didn’t wear a wedding ring, and his divorce had probably occurred years earlier. He was in a line of work that made marriage very difficult, and any man who had five offices spread out across the country was never home. The failure of his marriage had been all but preordained.
Kira sat in Jake’s chair facing his laptop, and her fingers flew over the keypad and touch screen at a furious pace. She digested entire screens of information as fast as they appeared before jumping to the next. In minutes she had hacked into the base’s personnel files, which weren’t all that secure, and found what she needed.
Her escape plan set, it was time to leave. She just had to decide how to accomplish the simple task of getting by the three highly trained men outside. She could lure them into Jake’s office and shoot them, but this would likely result in their deaths. And if all three didn’t enter, the last could close the door and call in reinforcements and she would lose the element of surprise.
If she exited, however, all three guns would be trained on her before she finished opening the door. She calculated she would still have a ninety-four percent chance of taking all three men out before one could get off a shot, but these odds weren’t high enough.
The zipper of the jumpsuit she was wearing ran from just below her chin to just below her navel. She zipped it down all the way, pulled the jumpsuit open, and then, gripping the fabric with both hands, forced a jagged tear lower still, so that her vagina was now fully exposed along with her breasts.
She lowered herself to the floor near the door and calmly forced her tear ducts to release their contents from the corners of her eyes. She banged on the door, about six inches off the ground, with both fists together.
“Help me,” she yelled hysterically. “Oh, God, please help me.”
The door was thrown open almost immediately. The moment it was she rolled out into the hall, keeping her hands behind her, and lay sprawled on her back as if she were injured, tears streaming down her face. “Your boss is an animal,” she whispered through sobs. “He tried to . . . to rape me.”
The three guards all had their guns drawn and pointed at her, but her tears, her torn jumpsuit, and her nakedness had the desired effect. They had been trained to react decisively to almost any situation, but this was an exception. She counted on their chivalrous instincts to lead them astray, and they didn’t disappoint. They each lowered their weapon to assess this unthinkable turn of events, and determine the extent of injuries that had been inflicted on this beautiful naked woman, dangerous though she might be.
Two of the guards leaned through the opening in the door to see how the girl had managed to fend off the colonel as he had tried to assault her.
This was all Kira needed. She swept the legs out from under one of the guards so viciously, and with such precision, that he had no time to cushion his fall. His head hit the ground with a loud crack and he lost consciousness. She sprang up from the floor acrobatically and drove the heal of her palm into the neck of a second man, knocking him out cold. As he slumped to the floor she kicked the gun from the third guard’s hand and faced him.
Just before he assumed a fighting posture, his eyes darted down to her bare breasts for just an instant. The single-mindedness of the male brain, even during a crisis, was surprising even to the enhanced version of Kira Miller.
He attempted several blows that would have knocked out a moose had they landed, but none came close. Kira read his body language precisely and knew where his attacks
were coming from, and going to, as soon as he did. She waited until he tried to land several more blows, with both his feet and hands, and then calmly drove a knife-hand into his neck while he was lunging at her, knowing he would miss and wouldn’t recover fast enough to block her. Sure enough, her strike landed with stunning force and accuracy, and he fell to his knees. Before he recovered his senses, she threw an arm around him in a choke hold and coaxed him gently to sleep.
She stepped out of the jumpsuit and began stripping the smallest of the guards, who was still quite a bit larger than she was. The clothing was ridiculously baggy but better than a torn jumpsuit, and would make a soldier hesitate before firing, if only for a moment. One of the men had a small night vision scope in his belt, which she confiscated, along with a gun and a number of spare clips. She returned to the office and retrieved Jake’s laptop and cell phone.
While she had been unconscious, day had turned into night, and she slipped out of the building and ran to open ground, where she shot out two lamps that were providing the only illumination for the area. She only had minutes before reinforcements would be arriving. She sprinted west and shot out several more lights in a straight line toward the nearest gate. She paused to toss the colonel’s phone into a thicket of trees, where it would serve as a decoy and draw a crowd, and then circled back to where she had started.
The men coming after her would quickly discover she had taken the night vision scope, and given her attack on lamps, would assume she planned to cling to darkness. But she had no intention of relying on night vision to gain an advantage. Their night vision equipment was superior to hers, so she would do the opposite. She would stay in lighted areas to the east while they were running around with their goggles down searching the darkness to the west.
She was almost half a mile to the east when reinforcements appeared, fanning out from Jake’s building westward. She continued sprinting at a pace she could have only maintained for a minute or two if not for her ability to optimize oxygen delivery to her muscles.
She had covered several more miles and was sprinting across a deserted parking lot when a shot rang out behind her. Apparently, not everyone was looking to the west.
Shit! she thought. Even she wasn’t immune from bad luck. She had already determined this was the riskiest stretch of ground she had yet covered, since she was somewhat visible, despite the lot not being lighted, and there was absolutely no cover to be had.
“Halt!” shouted a deep voice behind her, and she calculated from its direction and distance that even with her amplified reflexes and reaction time, she needed to follow this order. She stopped abruptly and turned around. A lone commando was holding an assault rifle on her unwaveringly, fifteen feet away. “Hands up!” he barked.
She lifted her arms straight up, gripping the colonel’s laptop in one hand. When her hands reached as high as they would go she released the computer, which fell to the ground and smashed into the concrete near her feet.
The commando followed the dropped computer for only a few seconds, but this was enough. Having precalculated the effect of her diversion, Kira was a blur of motion from the instant she released the laptop. Before he could return his attention to her, she had removed her gun and shot the weapon from his hand, and then, already racing toward him, put a bullet through the meaty part of his leg, making sure on behalf of her pathetic alter ego that the wound was one from which he would fully recover.
She closed the distance between them in seconds, not wanting to give him a chance to alert others to her whereabouts. She reached him just as he finished drawing a second gun and kicked it from his hand before he could squeeze off a shot. He tried to fight her off, but he would have been no match for her even with a fully functioning leg, and like the others who had faced her previously, he, too, was soon unconscious.
And Kira Miller continued on into the night.
27
The colonel walked along the east perimeter of Peterson Air Force Base and frowned deeply as he spotted several helicopters in the distance, returning to base after yet another unsuccessful search-and-destroy mission. His forehead was bandaged, and he had a nasty headache that had lasted a full twenty-four hours and showed little sign of subsiding.
“At this point, we’re probably just wasting our time,” said John Kolke walking along beside him.
Jake nodded. “Four more hours, and I’ll call off the search. At least from the air.” He shook his head in disgust. “By now she could have reached anywhere in the world.” He stopped walking and stared up at the razor-wire fence, wondering if the girl had pole vaulted over—or perhaps levitated.
“I have to admit,” said Kolke, “I always thought you were giving this woman too much credit. She couldn’t possibly be as good as you thought. But I was wrong. I still can’t quite believe what she was able to do. In addition to you, she took out four of our best men without even breaking a sweat, and then managed to run a gauntlet and somehow escape. I spoke with Lieutenant Doherty, the guard outside of your office who fought her hand-to-hand—at least tried to. He told me he never came close to landing a blow.”
“If only I would have been conscious,” said Jake, knowing there were a number of ‘if only’ scenarios he’d be beating himself up over for some time to come. “We’d have probably stopped her. Or had her at the fence line. The second it was clear she was heading for the west perimeter, I would have sent all of our forces east.”
“I’m not sure that would have mattered. Yes we concentrated our forces and technology on the west perimeter, but it’s not as though the east was unprotected or unwatched. You can’t just waltz out of a base when it’s on high alert, no matter which perimeter you choose.”
A burst of rage surged through the black-ops colonel, but this only served to heighten the pain in his head to excruciating levels. He forced his emotions to settle down and the pain subsided to merely throbbing.
Now they were almost back to square one, he thought in disgust, but this time he kept his anger in check. No Rosenblatt, no Desh, and no Miller. And she had all but telegraphed her escape. She had offered her help and told him he knew how to reach her, as though she wasn’t even a prisoner. Her audacity was mindboggling. She had practically dared him to take greater precautions, and he, like a fool, had ignored his instincts.
But why had she spared his life? And the lives of everyone else she had encountered? They had been hers for the taking. By not killing them, she had slowed her own escape and increased the chances she would be caught.
Jake had turned into a ruthless monster when he had been under the influence. The tiny voice that was his true self had tried to rein in his altered self, but had been ignored. The force of personality it must have taken for Kira Miller to stop her enhanced self from killing anyone during her escape must have been off the charts. Jake was certain he could not have done it.
Did this mean that she wasn’t the monster he was led to believe? Was her story true after all?
He frowned, and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. More likely, this was exactly what she wanted him to think. She was a monster fooling the villagers into thinking she was docile, to put future hunting parties off guard.
Kolke gestured in the direction of their offices. “Should we head back?” he asked, interrupting the colonel’s musings.
Jake took one last look at the perimeter fence in both directions for as far as he could see, as if somehow a clue to how she had managed it would emerge where none had before. “Yes. Let’s go,” he said as he began walking. “We have a lot of work to do.”
28
David Desh and Matt Griffin pulled up to the guard gate in a van, the technology on their key rings ensuring any camera that picked them up wouldn’t get a clean enough imagine to satisfy the needs of facial recognition software. Desh had altered his appearance enough that even if the guard had a picture and description, he was sure to let him pass. And Griffin was still off the grid as far as the military was concerned, which was good, since n
o wig or application of makeup could hide this bearded bear of a man.
“Bill Sampson,” said Desh to the guard. “Crazy Eddie’s Carpeting. We’re here to install carpeting for a . . .”
Beside him Matt Griffin consulted a tablet computer he was holding. “Captain Hernandez,” he offered.
“Right, Captain Hernandez,” repeated Desh. “I have the work order right here. I’m told you’ve been notified to expect us.”
“Why isn’t there any writing on the van?” asked the guard suspiciously. “Shouldn’t it say Crazy Eddie’s Carpeting?”
Desh smiled. “We’re independent installers,” he replied smoothly. “Eddie sells it, we install it.”
“Mind if I look inside?” the guard asked politely. But Desh knew it wasn’t a question.
“Sure thing,” replied Desh.
The guard opened the sliding door. There was nothing inside except a long wooden box along one wall, about the size of a coffin. He lifted the lid, which was on hinges, and peered inside. The container was completely filled with a tightly rolled section of thin carpeting.”
“What’s with the box?”
“Makes it easier to carry the carpet,” explained Desh. “I’ve got a bad back.”
“Doesn’t look like a lot of carpet,” noted the guard.
“It isn’t. We’re just doing a few closets. Shouldn’t take us more than an hour or so.”
Satisfied with Desh’s answers, the guard tore off a sheet from a pad of paper, with each page depicting a map of the base. “You’re here,” he said, drawing an X on the pad. He ran his pen straight, then right, and then left. “On-base housing is here,” he added, marking another X. “Do you have the captain’s address?” he asked, handing Desh the map.
Desh nodded and the guard waved him through.
Once they were out of sight of the gate Griffin’s fingers moved over the tablet. We’re in, he wrote. Be ready for pickup in approximately six minutes.
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