by J D Lasica
The room went silent. Finally Redman spoke up. “I’ve got some contacts at NSA.”
“All right, great,” Alice said.
She’d long heard second-hand reports about Redman’s behind-the-scenes dealings both inside the government and with the rich and connected. There was also a rumor going around that he was a prepper—one of those survivalist types—and that he had a secret multimillion-dollar luxury bunker in Fiji just in case civilization was about to collapse. Man, these billionaires and their play money.
She turned to her executive assistant. “Paula, let’s begin a contingency plan in case some of us need to travel to the island in the next twenty-four hours.”
“On it.” Paula added the action item to her list.
Alice knew it was time to wrap. “I’ll take the lead on contacting Bailey Finnerty’s parents. Mr. Redman will let us know if he turns up anything. And team. This Chairman Incognito character. Let’s turn over every stone to see what we can dig up on him.”
37
Manhattan
Eileen Mills paused to adjust her designer AR glasses as she stood in front of the window outside Saks Fifth Avenue. Like many consumers, she resisted the idea of wearing them for the longest time, until the frames were so inconspicuous they blended into the crowd. Now they were all but indistinguishable from any other pair of glasses.
Every year she and Bailey had made a ritual of heading out from Long Island to Manhattan for their early Christmas shopping. She’d debated whether to skip it this year. In the end, she decided to buy just one gift—to give her daughter a welcome-home present as soon as she returned. But what do you get a daughter who’s been missing for six months?
She cycled through the special offers and loyalty points from nearby stores. She liked that the glasses were turning up all sorts of interesting tidbits about what was inside the stores as she passed by.
She continued down Fifth Avenue toward the Guess store, pausing at East 48th until the glasses told her it was safe to cross. She stepped into the intersection. A speeding taxi blasted through a red light and almost struck her. She jumped back onto the curb, startled by the near miss. What the hell? Looks like even smartglasses aren’t infallible. She felt a shot of adrenaline kick in, sharpening her reflexes.
She crossed East 48th, keeping well back in the swarm of pedestrians. New York was still a struggle for her, but she decided after the divorce to move from Virginia to Long Island to be closer to her ailing retired parents. Bailey hated apartment life in Hicksville—“Are you kidding me? Hicksville?”—and was in full-on teen rebel mode by the time she turned sixteen. She demanded to live with her father back in Virginia during senior year of high school, and Eileen finally relented. Not a day passed when she didn’t blame herself for that decision.
This never would have happened if I stood strong. If I’d just been a good mom.
She hopped up onto the curb and watched the faces of the passing strangers, some of whom were wearing glasses themselves. Did they know? Were they being alerted about what a miserable failure of a mom I’ve been? After all, she’d been on the news after the Disappearance. Her shoulders knotted up at the thought.
This new world of transparency—of glasses that annotate the world—had its upsides, but it had its spooky side, too. This particular AR channel had facial recognition turned on. While the names of the passing strangers were blocked for privacy reasons, the public records about them was not. A smug-looking Wall Street type walking in front of her just sold his Upper East Side condo for $18.2 million. A city architect to her right was pulling down more than five times her teacher’s salary of $45,000 a year.
She gritted her teeth at the poor decisions she’d made. She owned a car that was eighteen years old with 270,000 miles on it and a cracked windshield she couldn’t afford to replace.
In the doorway of a clothing store on her left, a priest held the door open for a mom and her two young sons. A simple line of white text appeared, superimposed across his chest: Accused of molesting seven altar boys. He looked up at her and she averted her eyes. Not my business.
She stabbed at the button on the right side of her glasses but couldn’t toggle off the data. And now, what was this? An alert notification. Half a block up the street, advancing toward her, were three African American teenage boys wearing hoodies. She was not one to leap to assumptions, but the facial recognition feature flashed a warning across the bottom third of her field of vision:
Super predators.
She froze and tucked her purse beneath her coat. She looked around. Nobody seemed to notice the threat. She spotted a traffic cop back at the intersection and sprinted toward him. By the time she reached the corner, she was out of breath.
“Officer! Those boys!”
He waved his arms and waved at drivers in his lime-green vest, white cap, and white gloves. “Which boys?”
She didn’t want to be obvious and point, so she jutted her chin out toward the approaching young men who were laughing at something.
“What they do?” The cop glanced at her then went back to directing traffic.
The glasses didn’t say what they did. But now she saw a second alert. Her glasses threw a red circle around the face of a man standing at curbside on the far side of Fifth. What now? A moment later, the glasses flashed a warning:
Terrorist suspect.
She moved a few feet to her left to get a better view. My God, what was going on? He was a bearded Middle Eastern man in his twenties. His right arm sagged from the weight of carrying a black polycarbonate suitcase. He kept looking furtively to his right and left.
What was in the case? A bomb? A dirty bomb?
“Officer, that man! Check his suitcase!” She noticed she sounded out of breath and her voice was trembling.
“All right, Miss. Time to move along.” The officer turned his back to her, blew his nerve-rattling whistle, and motioned for the pedestrians to cross. She felt her face flush red. This officer doesn’t believe me!
She had to tell someone. What if she could have stopped a terrorist bombing and did nothing? She reached for the phone in her pocket just as it rang.
“Yes?” She wiped a sheen of sweat from her cheeks.
“I’m looking for Eileen Mills,” the voice on the line said.
“Who is this? I can’t talk right now.” She felt agitated at the dangers swirling around her. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? I have to call 911.
“Ms. Mills, my name is Alice Wong. I have information about your missing daughter.”
She’d received her share of crank calls over the past six months and was in no mood for it now. Her heart was racing now.
“Listen, I’m about to call the police. Don’t call me again—”
“Ms. Mills, please listen. It’s about Bailey. I believe we know where Bailey is being held.”
38
Samana Cay
After a fifteen-minute taxi ride from Lynden Pindling International Airport in the Bahamas' capital of Nassau, Kaden wheeled her suitcase down the pier of Albany Marina on the south side of New Providence island. Bo, Nico, Tosh, Carlos, and Judy Matthews followed right behind.
“Is this the harbor where you rented a boat for us?” she asked Bo.
“Slight change of plans. Bigger boat, bigger team.” Bo nodded toward three figures waiting for them at a slip in the distance at the far side of the pier.
“Why the change in plans? Who’s joining us?”
“You know that call I took as soon as our flight touched down? That was my ex. Bailey’s mom. She sounded … different. She said she was on an adrenaline high, but she sounded a little frantic.”
“Oh, because she’s a woman, she was hysterical, is that it?”
“I’m saying I know Eileen. She’s always grounded, and it was like she was in overdrive and couldn’t calm down. But I buried the lead. She got a call from the editor of Axom.”
“Alex’s news site?”
“You know this guy?” Bo ask
ed.
“Yeah. We’re friends.”
They’d met two months ago when Alex was covering the Birthrights Unlimited scandal for Axom. He was onto a new story now, and she’d forged his documents for Samana Cay. He’d left her two messages. She tried to text him from Zurich and call him on the ride to the harbor, but so far no luck.
“Well,” Bo said, “it seems Alex spotted my daughter on Samana Cay.”
“That’s great news! Now we’re not following a shot in the dark, we’re following a solid lead. That’s the break we’ve been looking for.”
“It is.” Bo’s face registered only worry, not hope.
“I hear a but coming.”
“Nobody’s been able to reach Alex for the past twenty-eight hours.”
Tosh caught up on their left side and joined the conversation. “So you’ve heard. This changes the equation. This is now an extraction operation.”
“For Bailey and Alex?”
“And, we hope, for the other missing girls,” Tosh said. “Two planes out of Zurich touched down on Samana Cay in the past few hours. Another on the way.”
“How do you know that?” Kaden asked. “Agency contacts?”
Tosh held up his phone. “Flight tracker app from the App Store. Chances are one or both of those flights include the figures calling the shots.”
Kaden considered this. On the flight from Zurich, she watched and listened to the entire recording of the Compact’s meeting in Zug. She’d shared the Ezekiel file with Red Team Zero. Bo told her he’d try to get the attention of someone higher up at DIA. Maybe plans are finally in motion behind the scenes.
But hope was not a plan. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “But this sounds like a bigger mission than Red Team Zero can chew off.”
“I don’t disagree,” Bo said. “But we’re not waiting on anyone.”
As they tramped down the pier, the figures in the distance came into focus. The most senior member of the trio stepped forward to meet them. He was a tall, silver-haired business type wearing dark blue chinos and a gray track jacket.
“Bo Finnerty? Kaden Baker? Paul Redman.” They all shook hands. “And these are two of Axom’s finest, Alice and Charlie.”
Charlie gestured with two fingers toward a massive yacht in the slip to their right. “And this baby is our bad-ass ride.”
Kaden saw she had a new alert from Amelia. They were about to set sail and they’d be out of Wi-Fi range, so she stepped off to the side and maximized Amelia.
Amelia appeared on the edge of the pier wearing dusty overalls. “Hi, sugar. Know you’re heading off but though you’d want to know. You received a notification about your paternity test results. There’s a 99.9 percent probability that Bo is your genetic father.”
This was a life-altering moment, and Kaden had hoped for a more dramatic announcement. But there was no fanfare or flourish of trumpets—and no time to dwell on the news.
“Thanks, Amelia.” Kaden minimized her and wheeled her luggage toward the others who were now boarding Redman’s yacht, the Carpe Diem. At the bottom of the boarding ramp, Bo stood waiting for her.
Bo, her father.
For Kaden, the operation started to fill in during the long ride to Samana Cay. Redman seemed to be something of a nautical nut and adventure seeker. Alice Wong turned out to be Axom’s editor. Charlie Adams was a hard-charging reporter and Alex’s friend. Kaden was relieved to hear the Axom people were intent on bringing Alex and Bailey home and news stories about their adventure would take a back seat.
Redman kicked things off with a tour of Carpe Diem. At 200 feet long, it featured three decks, a huge owner’s private terrace facing forward, a helideck at the bow, and a mosaic swimming pool that could transform into a dance floor.
Tosh and Carlos took a few minutes to ask questions about the elaborate communications controls linked to a dedicated Intelsat Earth Station satellite with an X-band uplink, which was mumbo-jumbo to her but seemed to impress the boys. Kaden and Nico checked out their cabins below.
She’d lost her beloved Beretta back on the slopes, but Bo gave her a spare SIG Sauer P226 Scorpion. She stashed the pistol, her fake passport, and her smart contacts in her fanny pack—no need for Amelia to make an appearance during the ride to Samana Cay.
After a short while, she and Nico joined everyone in the owner’s terrace on top. Charlie appeared with a round of Bahama Mamas and poured drinks. Kaden decided to be a stick-in-the-mud and grabbed another glass of water. People made introductions before the talk turned to the extraction. Alice passed around her phone with the short snippet of Alex’s last message before he was cut off.
“So what’s the game plan when we get there?” Kaden asked.
“I was thinking we’d head straight to the authorities.” Judy Matthews looked around at the others. “No?”
Kaden shot her a look of disbelief, but Bo cut her off.
“From what we’ve been able to establish,” Bo said, “there’s every likelihood the top government officials know what’s going on, at minimum.”
She noticed Bo didn’t yet share the news that their surveillance of the Compact revealed a much larger conspiracy with global implications, even though he’d passed that information to his contacts in the DIA. First things first. Save friends and family, then save the world.
Bo turned to face the Axom people. “What have you guys turned up about this character Incognito?”
“We have a dozen people just starting to dig in,” Alice said. “Nobody seems to know much about him, other than he spends most of his time in Belarus. Public records in Belarus are hard to come by, to say the least.”
Oddly, the video footage didn’t capture a clear image of Incognito’s face behind the partition. Bo theorized it had something to do with face masking technology, a cutting-edge technique used by some political leaders, celebrities, and illusionists.
Kaden thought about this misfit menace Incognito. He was probably the one who ordered Savić to come after me. He’s the one responsible for Gabriel’s death. He might even be the ringleader behind the Disappearance.
If priority one was the rescue, job two was to take down Incognito.
Kaden sipped her water and took stock of how unsettled her world had become. Her sense of who she was and what mattered to her had been rocked to its core during the past few weeks. First, she uncovered the revolting spectacle of scores of young women forced into surrogacy at Birthrights Unlimited, ending with a shootout and her facing possible murder charges.
Then, she opened up and made herself vulnerable to a serious relationship with Gabriel, only to see it end tragically. His death—that’s on me.
Then, her biological father showed up to involve her in a search-and-rescue mission for the half-sister she never knew she had. Her shoulder still throbbed in pain after yesterday’s encounter with a hitman. Nearly got killed.
This is not a good run I’m having.
If there was the smallest hint of good to come out of it, it was finding her real father and filling in some of the blanks. She suspected Bo was still holding back, though. She needed him to be straight with her. I need someone I can count on. Someone besides Nico I can trust.
They got down to business and sketched out a rudimentary search operation, starting with aerial surveillance of the island followed by splitting into pairs. Kaden would partner with Nico, given they’d pulled several special ops together and knew each other’s moves.
The trip took most of the afternoon, but they finally got within sight of the island. They were approaching from the west—the more populous end where cruise ships docked at Samana Village—so Redman took them on a course south of the island to the less developed southeastern sector. If Alex and Bailey were being held on the island, chances were good they weren’t being held smack in the middle of the touristy village center.
They watched from the owner’s terrace high above as Tosh and Carlos set up their gear and used Carpe Diem’s navigational system to send a swarm
of fist-sized drones toward shore. These were considerably larger than the micro-drones used in Zug but smaller than the drones you’d see in public parks.
“I’m sure we’re breaking all sorts of laws,” Bo said. “The whole island is a no-fly zone. Generally, you can’t fly a drone within five miles of an airport, and Samana Cay has one just over that ridge.”
She watched as the drones lifted off from the heliport at the front of the yacht and hovered overhead before moving toward the southern shoreline. The drones were colored to match the sky, but she could still see their outlines move in unison in a magnificent swarm that reminded her of a starling murmuration. They swooped in beautiful synchronized formations like a giant paintbrush swirling across a brilliant blue canvas.
As they watched, Bo lowered his voice so only she’d be able to hear him. “I have a question for you. And something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
This was good. Maybe he was starting to confide in her. No more secrets. I need to tell him about the paternity results, too. But this doesn’t feel like the right time.
“Your mother,” Bo said. “You and I discussed her medical history back at the diner.”
She nodded. Weeks before she’d met her Bo, she hacked her grandfather Randolph Blackburn’s digital vault and read his medical records. He had a rare form of C-J disease, an incurable degenerative nerve condition that could strike at any age. He handed it down to her mother. It was the same condition now scrambling Blackburn’s brain.
Bo looked deadly serious. “All these years, I felt it wasn’t my place. But they told you about your odds. Right?”
She looked at him. This was the conversation she decided not to have with her grandfather. “Nobody’s ever discussed it with me. I know I have a fifty-fifty chance of carrying the gene.”
“You’re talking about it so damn clinically. This is your life. You got tested so you know the results, right?”
